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Note that the only reason Spolsky is doing this is because he bet on Mercurial a few years ago for his project http://www.fogcreek.com/Kiln/ http://www.fogcreek

Note that the only reason Spolsky is doing this is because he bet on Mercurial a few years ago for his project http://www.fogcreek.com/Kiln/ http://www.fogcreek.com/Kiln/ which is Mercurial only. Unfortunately for him, git got more popular than hg so now he's promoting hg as much as possible.

Quiark 17y ago
Or maybe they don't want to risk a program that isn't 100% Windows compatible, because lots of their potential customers use Windows.
- weaksauce 17y ago
  I don't use windows much but msysgit is good. I was pleasantly surprised with it. The GUI is a bit fractured in terms of what it can do but the command line is competent. For a commercial product that needs to be integrated in the windows world like kiln I would have made the same decision that Joel did. (Though I prefer git overall)
- jefffoster 17y ago
  There was a recent article by Martin Fowler (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1131664 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1131664) suggesting that the "view now is that msysgit is good enough to make comparison with Mercurial a non-issue for Windows." (edit change link to the YCombinator discussion)
- jrockway 17y ago
  As a hardcore UNIX/git user, I've found the Windows git tools to be more than adequate.
  - tghw 17y ago
    If only Windows users were hardcore UNIX users...everything would be so much easier. No GUI code, no leaking GDI objects, no Java Swing, no WxWidgets, no cross-browser bugs (curl would be the only browser), no DPI scaling issues, no DLL hell, and no IE. Just text. Beautiful, green text. And it would all be BSD licensed. Oh, what a wonderful world that would be...
- freetard 17y ago
  Nice FUD, Git has been running just fine on windows for years.
  - gecko 17y ago
    While msysgit runs okay on Windows as of fairly recently, for a very long time, Git had very bad performance on Windows, and required Cygwin. Saying that it ran fine for years is pretty bad hyperbole--especially since both Git and Mercurial are only about two years old at this point.
    - freetard 17y ago
      Yeah, except that Git is 5 years old and that the Cygwin requirement was just a dll that came _with_ the installer and was _automatically_ installed with Git. Nobody would notice except people that had an agenda against git (hg supporters, svn etc). Edit: about performance, while Git was slower on windows than on linux, it was still faster than both SVN and Mercurial.
      - freetard 17y ago
        Interesting, I'm getting downvoted for telling the truth. Maybe I should just go with the HN flow so here it goes: Git still doesn't work well on windows and it's damn slow and only 2 years old, also running it with cygwin was a pain because you had to install it manually and stuff. High 5 y'all! /me disappointed by HN, expected better than reddit like users.
        deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      - inaequitas 17y ago
        People don't have an agenda against git — it simply doesn't work for them. It's not the holy grail of DVCS', and neither are Hg or bzr; different tools for different people. Where are you getting your performance results from? The footnote from Google's article[1] on choosing between Mercurial and git states that Hg was faster both over HTTP and when compared to git's wire protocol. But I'm willing to admit those numbers may be old, so is there a newer published benchmark anywhere? [1]: http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis
hello_moto 17y ago
First of all, it's better than someone pushing SVN. Second, it's like Python vs Ruby (Hg vs Git). Doesn't matter. Third, any attempt to fix the current issues of programming is better than "just hire a super-human-developer and leave him alone". Spolsky pushed bug tracking systems couple years ago, now he's advertising code review and better code commit/build workflow.

Quiark 17y ago

Or maybe they don't want to risk a program that isn't 100% Windows compatible, because lots of their potential customers use Windows.

weaksauce 17y ago
I don't use windows much but msysgit is good. I was pleasantly surprised with it. The GUI is a bit fractured in terms of what it can do but the command line is competent. For a commercial product that needs to be integrated in the windows world like kiln I would have made the same decision that Joel did. (Though I prefer git overall)
jefffoster 17y ago
There was a recent article by Martin Fowler (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1131664 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1131664) suggesting that the "view now is that msysgit is good enough to make comparison with Mercurial a non-issue for Windows." (edit change link to the YCombinator discussion)
jrockway 17y ago
As a hardcore UNIX/git user, I've found the Windows git tools to be more than adequate.
- tghw 17y ago
  If only Windows users were hardcore UNIX users...everything would be so much easier. No GUI code, no leaking GDI objects, no Java Swing, no WxWidgets, no cross-browser bugs (curl would be the only browser), no DPI scaling issues, no DLL hell, and no IE. Just text. Beautiful, green text. And it would all be BSD licensed. Oh, what a wonderful world that would be...
freetard 17y ago
Nice FUD, Git has been running just fine on windows for years.
- gecko 17y ago
  While msysgit runs okay on Windows as of fairly recently, for a very long time, Git had very bad performance on Windows, and required Cygwin. Saying that it ran fine for years is pretty bad hyperbole--especially since both Git and Mercurial are only about two years old at this point.
  - freetard 17y ago
    Yeah, except that Git is 5 years old and that the Cygwin requirement was just a dll that came _with_ the installer and was _automatically_ installed with Git. Nobody would notice except people that had an agenda against git (hg supporters, svn etc). Edit: about performance, while Git was slower on windows than on linux, it was still faster than both SVN and Mercurial.
    - freetard 17y ago
      Interesting, I'm getting downvoted for telling the truth. Maybe I should just go with the HN flow so here it goes: Git still doesn't work well on windows and it's damn slow and only 2 years old, also running it with cygwin was a pain because you had to install it manually and stuff. High 5 y'all! /me disappointed by HN, expected better than reddit like users.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
    - inaequitas 17y ago
      People don't have an agenda against git — it simply doesn't work for them. It's not the holy grail of DVCS', and neither are Hg or bzr; different tools for different people. Where are you getting your performance results from? The footnote from Google's article[1] on choosing between Mercurial and git states that Hg was faster both over HTTP and when compared to git's wire protocol. But I'm willing to admit those numbers may be old, so is there a newer published benchmark anywhere? [1]: http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis

hello_moto 17y ago

First of all, it's better than someone pushing SVN. Second, it's like Python vs Ruby (Hg vs Git). Doesn't matter. Third, any attempt to fix the current issues of programming is better than "just hire a super-human-developer and leave him alone". Spolsky pushed bug tracking systems couple years ago, now he's advertising code review and better code commit/build workflow.