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It's been ages at this point since I used Mercurial (around 2010) and probably these things changed along the way. - But with mercurial branching where more li

by mhitza 5y ago

It's been ages at this point since I used Mercurial (around 2010) and probably these things changed along the way. - But with mercurial branching where more like forks with different directories. Made me avoid that feature in web development work (that way I didn't have to fiddle with my webserver config every time I would have liked to create a branch) - I recall having to deal with a bunch of gotchas around mercurial bookmarks (tags), like not being able to delete them, problems with sharing them with others, and things like that. I was actively exploring different DVCS around that time, coming from a SVN background where I remember spending a lot of time fixing merge conflicts like a sucker. The one I liked, for its theoretical aspects, was darcs (as I was also leaning heavily in the Haskell ecosystem of the time). Anyway, in short for me git overtook mercurial because it was easy for me to hop around multiple branches, pick off individual commits, and rebase commits (I was still pedantic about how I formatted my commits before a PR, nowadays, not so much).

andrewshadura 5y ago
> But with mercurial branching where more like forks with different directories. That's bzr, not Mercurial. Mercurial has always had more advanced branches than Git.
- mhitza 5y ago
  It's been more than 10 years since I've used mercurial, so I had to try and dig up old documentation (hard to do with my Google-Fu), anyway I've found an older HN post that discuses the separate directory thing back in 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013320 I'm sure a lot has changed in that timespan, and maybe it was a bit more of a nuanced situation wrt branching, but the pain points are the things I can only vaguely recall at this point.
  - andrewshadura 5y ago
    That post may have been discussing it, but it was not based on the reality. Having multiple clones is just one of the workflows, one Git users also frequently employ. If anything, Mercurial’s branching model has always been richer than that of Git, since even when if didn’t have Git-style branches (bookmarks), it supported named branches and anonymous branches, which already allowed for a wider variety of workflows than Git ever did.

by mhitza 5y ago

andrewshadura 5y ago

> But with mercurial branching where more like forks with different directories. That's bzr, not Mercurial. Mercurial has always had more advanced branches than Git.

mhitza 5y ago
It's been more than 10 years since I've used mercurial, so I had to try and dig up old documentation (hard to do with my Google-Fu), anyway I've found an older HN post that discuses the separate directory thing back in 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013320 I'm sure a lot has changed in that timespan, and maybe it was a bit more of a nuanced situation wrt branching, but the pain points are the things I can only vaguely recall at this point.
- andrewshadura 5y ago
  That post may have been discussing it, but it was not based on the reality. Having multiple clones is just one of the workflows, one Git users also frequently employ. If anything, Mercurial’s branching model has always been richer than that of Git, since even when if didn’t have Git-style branches (bookmarks), it supported named branches and anonymous branches, which already allowed for a wider variety of workflows than Git ever did.