Re: [boost] [git] Mercurial?

Subject: Re: [boost] [git] Mercurial?
From: Anthony Williams (anthony.ajw_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-03-19 18:04:32

On 19/03/12 21:12, Jim Bosch wrote:
> 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.

I've had numerous problems with git, including getting my local git repo 
into a state where it would neither push to nor pull from the remote 
repo. On the other hand, I've had no problems with Mercurial, even 
though I've used it on more projects, with more branching and merging.

In one case, I was having such difficulty with git that I used hg-git to 
import my git repo into mercurial, so I could deal with the branches and 
merges in a sane fashion, then exported back to git.

All my problems basically boil down to one thing though: the user 
interface (command line) to git doesn't map cleanly to the way I think 
about stuff, or the operations I wish to do, whereas the user interface 
for mercurial does. For me, mercurial is intuitive, whereas git is not, 
in a big way.

Technically, they're on a par, and there are additional scripts and 
plugins for git that help with the UI.

As for mindshare and marketplace, there is widespread support and usage 
of both, and both are used by major projects.

Given the choice, I'd go for Mercurial every time, but either is better 
than subversion.

Anthony
-- 
Author of C++ Concurrency in Action     http://www.stdthread.co.uk/book/
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