Re: [boost] [git] Mercurial?

Subject: Re: [boost] [git] Mercurial?
From: Jim Bosch (talljimbo_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-03-19 17:12:02

On 03/19/2012 10:02 AM, Daryle Walker wrote:
>
> Git has a competitor called Mercurial?  If we're moving to a Distributed-VCS, should we go to Mercurial instead of Git?  They're kind-of like CVS vs. Subversion, except I think they came up in parallel.  (While Subversion was designed as an updated CVS.)  I think Git was made up of a bunch of script hacks, while Mercurial was a regimented single program.
> I don't have a preference, but I want to make sure we consider the rival options.

My organization recently switched from SVN to git.  Pretty much everyone 
was very happy with the result.  We also considered mercurial, and we 
all agreed that choosing between git and mercurial wasn't nearly as 
important as choosing either of them instead of svn.

That said, there are differences, and I'm glad we picked git.  I think 
the market- and mind-share arguments are real, and in git's favor. 
Anecdotally at least, it's interesting that bitbucket - which started as 
an all-mercurial hosting site - has more recently added git support:

http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/04/01/announcing-git-support/

And I think it's also telling that while git's branching model - one of 
the most important aspects of a VCS - is basically the same one it has 
always had, mercurial's branching model has evolved towards the git 
model (mercurial bookmarks == git branches).

So I think there's circumstantial evidence that git is a better design 
in some ways.  Mercurial is superficially more similar to svn, but given 
that they're both architecturally very different from svn, I think that 
could just as easily be seen as an advantage for git.

Jim Bosch