Yeah. From a technical standpoint Git is a lot worse in a lot of ways. From an ease-of-use standpoint it's about as much worse as it's possible to be.
Still, with Linux behind it, Git won the DVCS wars. Mercurial became an also-ran and now almost nobody uses it.
Too bad.
We'll need something new and innovative to come out and rid us of constant blogs explaining how Git works because it's too hard to understand how to make it do the things you want it to do.
I've been using Git for about 7 years now (5 exclusively) and I know how to use it, but I still have to look things up occasionally because its UI is trash and non-obvious. I didn't have that problem with Mercurial. There, I knew the verb and the built-in help was sufficient to get me where I wanted to go.
Just try to clone Mercurial repo (Firefox) and roll back in history to specific commit. Let me tell you beforehand - it is (at least used to be) impossible. What you could do is to "clone it again" up to specified point. You have to do it somewhere else on a filesystem just to needlessly spoil disk space and you end up having the same sources at least twice. When I asked why I got handwaving arguments about code history being sacred, which is of course nonsense. If it was so... in Git I'd make another branch and rewind to commit I care about without wasting another 25gigs of disk. How can be this achieved in mercurial these days (without waste)? Back in days I wanted to do some work specifically on Firefox, and those steps were the only I could come up with after a lot of searching and asking questions, and because of Mercurial I gave up, to me it felt like it was a high entry barrier on purpose.
> Yeah. From a technical standpoint Git is a lot worse in a lot of ways. From an ease-of-use standpoint it's about as much worse as it's possible to be.
Ten years ago, when I had started to use git after having used both Subversion and Mercurial, I noticed one thing.
Git was FAST.
On repositories of the same size, git was blowing Mercurial out of the water and running circles around it, that's how fast it was.
It was FAST and it fucking got out of my way and let me work.
I don't know the inner workings of either and academic advantages of Mercurial, but I know for a fact it had been a dog and its move to Python 3 had been disastrous. So whichever technical or UX advantages Mercurial might have, I simply don't care anymore.
> We'll need something new and innovative to come out and rid us of constant blogs explaining how Git works because it's too hard to understand how to make it do the things you want it to do.
Still, with Linux behind it, Git won the DVCS wars. Mercurial became an also-ran and now almost nobody uses it.
Too bad.
We'll need something new and innovative to come out and rid us of constant blogs explaining how Git works because it's too hard to understand how to make it do the things you want it to do.
I've been using Git for about 7 years now (5 exclusively) and I know how to use it, but I still have to look things up occasionally because its UI is trash and non-obvious. I didn't have that problem with Mercurial. There, I knew the verb and the built-in help was sufficient to get me where I wanted to go.
Worse is better wins again.