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Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git
From: |
Alan Mackenzie |
Subject: |
Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git |
Date: |
Sat, 4 Jan 2014 18:34:58 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) |
On Sat, Jan 04, 2014 at 12:40:10PM -0500, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On Sat, 2014-01-04 at 18:31 +0100, David Engster wrote:
> > Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso writes:
> > > bzr has its merits, and I applaud the efforts to give it a nice UI
> > > efforts and its documentation is quite good, but it's obviously not
> > > fit for Emacs. If it were, we wouldn't be having this discussion in
> > > the first place.
> > You keep repeating this, and it is still wrong. We do the switch
> > because Bazaar is dead.
> bzr dying is a consequence of its technical demerits. If it were good
> code, it would survive even in the face of git's popularity, just as
> hg has survived and is doing quite well.
I think bzr was somewhat lacking in good documentation and simplicity. I
found it quirky to use, and never got to like it, though clearly some
people do like it a lot.
git has prospered, I think, because it is used by Linux (just like C did
because it was used by Unix).
> bzr didn't die merely because of Canonical's involvement. If people
> liked it enough, they would have forked it, maintained it themselves.
> It's free software. It can't be "effectively privatised", like someone
> else said.
There seems to have been something peculiar about bzr that it died so
suddenly. Maybe maintaining the code had become drudgery. Normally, I'd
expect a project like that to peter out over many years rather than be
abandoned abruptly like bzr was.
> Darcs has failed to be popular because it was slow and buggy (and
> perhaps because Haskell is much more niche and can't attract enough
> developers, but I'm not so sure about this).
Darcs is still alive though, isn't it? It would be good if Haskell
became less niche, I think.
> But hg has great architecture, is built by a kernel hacker just like
> git is, it's just as fast and somtimes faster than git, and it has a
> common enough programming language that it has no trouble attracting
> contributors. Like I said, mpm's devotion to keeping hg free and
> GNU-friendly is also a very good point in favour.
I agree with you about Mercurial. It is vastly superior to git in terms
of documentation and simplicity; it has a single man page written in a
lively compelling style and must surely approach closely the elusive goal
of "as simple as possible but not simpler". I selected hg for CC Mode a
couple of years ago, and don't regret the decision.
The impression I have of git (though I haven't used it) is that it is the
C++ of DVCSs - loaded up with feature after feature, many of marginal
utility. I'd love to be mistaken on this point. I do wonder if new
contributers to projects are ever discouraged by the difficulty of
learning git - it must be an order of magnitude more difficult to learn
to use effectively than CVS or Mercurial.
I would support changing to Mercurial (which I believe has a long life
ahead of it), but accept the sheer weight of numbers of those who like or
already use git makes this most unlikely.
> - Jordi G. H.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, (continued)
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, David Engster, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, David Kastrup, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, David Kastrup, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, David Engster, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, David Engster, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git,
Alan Mackenzie <=
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Óscar Fuentes, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Stefan Monnier, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Leo Liu, 2014/01/05
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Eli Zaretskii, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Paul Eggert, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Eli Zaretskii, 2014/01/04
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Darren Hoo, 2014/01/06
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Stefan Monnier, 2014/01/06
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Eli Zaretskii, 2014/01/06
- Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git, Paul Eggert, 2014/01/06