4 ms·

No. I had to use mercurial at my old job and everyone in the company saw mercurial as an easy and efficient alternative to git - something which I could not com

No. I had to use mercurial at my old job and everyone in the company saw mercurial as an easy and efficient alternative to git - something which I could not comprehend. And truthfully after using the "easier" solution, I'd rather take the code, print it out on punch cards and compare them in order to create the adequate changes by taping the holes accordingly and feed the punch cards back into the computer. Now that I'm saying it and having looked at how mercurial works underneath, it's not far off, with the exception that mercurial creates copies of all punch cards and keeps stacking them on top of each other. I've never hated any version control as much and I've had to use svn in the past. Git operates on a strict and crazy stupid model without adding unnecessary features and advertising them as "flexibility" or "ergonomics". I've worked with juniors who've never used git in the past and in all instances it took them a day at most to figure out how it works.

skinkestek 5y ago
SVN isn't that bad at all. Perforce on the other hand when it is set up for pessimistic locking, that was interesting when I had to use it in a team setting and trying to work from home 14 years ago.
- axegon_ 5y ago
  I mean... Credit where it's due: it certainly beats mercurial for me.
imarg 5y ago
We use mercurial at work. I actually like it very much (of course it might be because we follow a certain workflow). When I try to use git for personal projects (because everyone uses it and I'd like to learn it) and I really am struggling sometimes to get even the simplest workflow working as a single person. I can't even imagine how it would work when having multiple people work together.
- axegon_ 5y ago
  That's the point: you have to follow a workflow to make it even remotely usable. And even so, they are hacky workarounds at best and generally mercurial feel like the product of "that's good enough". And in a more general sense mercurial feels like(and in fact historically is) the product of unsolicited help. The concepts of having separate actions for pull and update are ridiculous. The --new-branch option is equally stupid. Many basic features are missing and you have to resort to stuff such as plugins like evolve or whatever it was called(say rename an existing branch without causing the universe to implode on itself). Back-merging in mercurial makes no sense if you live with the basic assumption that you have one default/master/main or whatever you wanna call it branch. And truthfully, storing the entire history of your work as diffs is what I'd assume Gutenberg would have come up with - great for the 15-th century but sticks and stones by 21-st century standards. And a ton of other basic features are either missing or a complete hack - stashing, rebasing, update-index, submodules and all the things which personally as a git user, I take for granted.

skinkestek 5y ago

SVN isn't that bad at all. Perforce on the other hand when it is set up for pessimistic locking, that was interesting when I had to use it in a team setting and trying to work from home 14 years ago.

axegon_ 5y ago
I mean... Credit where it's due: it certainly beats mercurial for me.

imarg 5y ago

We use mercurial at work. I actually like it very much (of course it might be because we follow a certain workflow). When I try to use git for personal projects (because everyone uses it and I'd like to learn it) and I really am struggling sometimes to get even the simplest workflow working as a single person. I can't even imagine how it would work when having multiple people work together.

axegon_ 5y ago
That's the point: you have to follow a workflow to make it even remotely usable. And even so, they are hacky workarounds at best and generally mercurial feel like the product of "that's good enough". And in a more general sense mercurial feels like(and in fact historically is) the product of unsolicited help. The concepts of having separate actions for pull and update are ridiculous. The --new-branch option is equally stupid. Many basic features are missing and you have to resort to stuff such as plugins like evolve or whatever it was called(say rename an existing branch without causing the universe to implode on itself). Back-merging in mercurial makes no sense if you live with the basic assumption that you have one default/master/main or whatever you wanna call it branch. And truthfully, storing the entire history of your work as diffs is what I'd assume Gutenberg would have come up with - great for the 15-th century but sticks and stones by 21-st century standards. And a ton of other basic features are either missing or a complete hack - stashing, rebasing, update-index, submodules and all the things which personally as a git user, I take for granted.