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Having never used mercurial. What are some of the places where mercurial provides a better interface than git?

marcinkuzminski 10y ago
Just read this: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/ And then think about that Mercurial simply makes handling branches/updates/resets in a very clean and consistent way.
- amdavidson 10y ago
  Clearly not a new post, but the first time I had seen it, clearly spells out what has frustrated me (and many others) for a very long time.
- pweissbrod 10y ago
  You really should warn us not to drink anything while reading that. I almost spit my drink over the keyboard laughing at this
brandmeyer 10y ago
The basic mercurial command set is directly descended from the time-tested cvs and svn commands. Significantly different tasks are executed with distinct commands. In contrast, git dispatches to a subprogram with the top-level command, and then also gets the subprogram to execute different distinguished tasks with its arguments. Its a rather leaky abstraction that pollutes the command syntax. But since I've said something disparaging about git, I want to balance it out with something nice about it. Git handles remote tracking branches much more nicely than mercurial. For a while I found myself in a mode where I did most of my work on my workstation, saved to a central repository for collaboration, and took a laptop into the lab/field (I'm an embedded developer). Git trivially allows me to handle multiple remotes from the laptop, with one remote referring to the desktop and one referring to the central repository. Since git lays down distinguished branch names automatically for all of (in mercurial terminology) the remote heads, its easy to diff/merge between them as appropriate when I'm in the field. In Hg, its impossible as far as I know. I had to set up multiple clones to track the two.

Just read this: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/ And then think about that Mercurial simply makes handling branches/updates/resets in a very clean and consistent way.

amdavidson 10y ago
Clearly not a new post, but the first time I had seen it, clearly spells out what has frustrated me (and many others) for a very long time.
pweissbrod 10y ago
You really should warn us not to drink anything while reading that. I almost spit my drink over the keyboard laughing at this

brandmeyer 10y ago

The basic mercurial command set is directly descended from the time-tested cvs and svn commands. Significantly different tasks are executed with distinct commands. In contrast, git dispatches to a subprogram with the top-level command, and then also gets the subprogram to execute different distinguished tasks with its arguments. Its a rather leaky abstraction that pollutes the command syntax. But since I've said something disparaging about git, I want to balance it out with something nice about it. Git handles remote tracking branches much more nicely than mercurial. For a while I found myself in a mode where I did most of my work on my workstation, saved to a central repository for collaboration, and took a laptop into the lab/field (I'm an embedded developer). Git trivially allows me to handle multiple remotes from the laptop, with one remote referring to the desktop and one referring to the central repository. Since git lays down distinguished branch names automatically for all of (in mercurial terminology) the remote heads, its easy to diff/merge between them as appropriate when I'm in the field. In Hg, its impossible as far as I know. I had to set up multiple clones to track the two.