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Mercurial had major projects too. Mozilla still uses it. What it didn't have was GitHub.
by pseudalopex 9y ago
Mercurial had major projects too. Mozilla still uses it. What it didn't have was GitHub.
- taeric 9y agoGood counterpoint! Oddly, in my mind, Mozilla is not nearly as new dev friendly as the kernel is. I suspect that is just a bias in my thinking, though. I feel that git was winning a lot of mindshare even before github. I know I certainly was using it before github. Big plus for me was the git-svn bridge that existed. Especially since I was working remotely at the time, it was much faster for me to do checkouts with a git-svn clone than to deal with raw svn checkouts. It wasn't even close. Did git beat Mercurial to that?
- pseudalopex 8y agoGit was popular in some influential circles before GitHub, but it only became a monoculture several years later. hgsubversion came out in 2008, after git-svn but before most people were using any DVCS. Also, SVK was around before git-svn. You might be underestimating how much support Mercurial had in the late 2000s. Mozilla, Sun, Google, and Microsoft all picked Mercurial over Git. Even GitHub published hg-git so people could use the Mercurial client with Git repos. Some ecosystems gravitated to Git (Linux, Perl, Ruby) and some gravitated to Mercurial (Windows, Java, Python). By 2010, DVCS comparisons consistently cited GitHub's UX and network effects as significant advantages for Git. Atlassian, Google, and Microsoft all added Git hosting in 2012. By 2015, Python, Google, and Microsoft moved to GitHub because everyone else was on GitHub. I think the landscape would look very different if GitHub hadn't come along when it did or had added Mercurial support instead of Subversion.