5 ms·

I adopted mercurial when git was "painful" to use. It seems as though this has changed, but I see no compelling reason to switch just because all the Rails kids

by apgwoz 18y ago

I adopted mercurial when git was "painful" to use. It seems as though this has changed, but I see no compelling reason to switch just because all the Rails kids think git's cool right now.

jmtulloss 18y ago
I love mercurial because it's so painless. It just works. Everywhere.
KirinDave 18y ago
Mercurial's metaphor for local branching is awkward. Git's metaphor is not, and most people go batty for it. That's a pretty good reason to change. I wouldn't use git if it didn't have cheap inline local branching. It is the Killer Feature.
- apgwoz 18y ago
  > Mercurial's metaphor for local branching is awkward. That may be true (honestly, I don't know), but I haven't yet needed to maintain different branches of projects I'm working on and so it's a non-issue at this point. If at some point it becomes an issue, and I find Mercurial lacking, then of course I'll take a closer look at git, who probably does it more appropriately.
  - mleonhard 18y ago
    It's a good idea to make a branch for each release. Then you can easily look at the code that's in production and make patches.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  Mercurial also has cheap local branching, though to my understanding it is easier to close out branches that have been merged back in / abandoned on git. The mercurial developers are working on this, though.
vito 18y ago
I used mercurial briefly and found it to be much, much slower compared to git.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  Under what OS, hardware platform, filesystem, project size, etc.? Not knee-jerk arguing, genuinely curious. When I compared them on Windows and OpenBSD, I never had a speed difference of more than about 5% (not counting git db repacking), even with a project that had 40,000+ commits, 10+ very active branches, and about 2 GB of code + data.
  - vito 18y ago
    Admittedly it was probably either the environment or the remote server causing the problem. I was running it under Cygwin on Vista, and it was a fairly huge project. I was running git under the same environment for the same thing (with a different remote origin), and even then I noticed git was much more snappy. It's nowhere near an actual analysis, just my experience in my limited use (and probably influenced quite a bit by things that I've heard).
    - silentbicycle 18y ago
      Ok. (I was using an actual timer when I compared them.)
jrockway 18y ago
all the Rails kids think git's cool right now A stopped clock is right twice a day.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  It doesn't matter if they understand what's actually cool about it, of course. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327085 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327085)
MicahWedemeyer 18y ago
I'm trying very hard to like git, being a Rails kid coming from the svn world. Still, besides the kickass merging, everything else seems ass-backwards. Remote work especially is bonkers. Push/pull? Easy. Add/Delete remote branch? Off to google for me...

by apgwoz 18y ago

I adopted mercurial when git was "painful" to use. It seems as though this has changed, but I see no compelling reason to switch just because all the Rails kids think git's cool right now.

jmtulloss 18y ago

I love mercurial because it's so painless. It just works. Everywhere.

KirinDave 18y ago

Mercurial's metaphor for local branching is awkward. Git's metaphor is not, and most people go batty for it. That's a pretty good reason to change. I wouldn't use git if it didn't have cheap inline local branching. It is the Killer Feature.

apgwoz 18y ago
> Mercurial's metaphor for local branching is awkward. That may be true (honestly, I don't know), but I haven't yet needed to maintain different branches of projects I'm working on and so it's a non-issue at this point. If at some point it becomes an issue, and I find Mercurial lacking, then of course I'll take a closer look at git, who probably does it more appropriately.
- mleonhard 18y ago
  It's a good idea to make a branch for each release. Then you can easily look at the code that's in production and make patches.
silentbicycle 18y ago
Mercurial also has cheap local branching, though to my understanding it is easier to close out branches that have been merged back in / abandoned on git. The mercurial developers are working on this, though.

vito 18y ago

I used mercurial briefly and found it to be much, much slower compared to git.

silentbicycle 18y ago
Under what OS, hardware platform, filesystem, project size, etc.? Not knee-jerk arguing, genuinely curious. When I compared them on Windows and OpenBSD, I never had a speed difference of more than about 5% (not counting git db repacking), even with a project that had 40,000+ commits, 10+ very active branches, and about 2 GB of code + data.
- vito 18y ago
  Admittedly it was probably either the environment or the remote server causing the problem. I was running it under Cygwin on Vista, and it was a fairly huge project. I was running git under the same environment for the same thing (with a different remote origin), and even then I noticed git was much more snappy. It's nowhere near an actual analysis, just my experience in my limited use (and probably influenced quite a bit by things that I've heard).
  - silentbicycle 18y ago
    Ok. (I was using an actual timer when I compared them.)

jrockway 18y ago

all the Rails kids think git's cool right now A stopped clock is right twice a day.

silentbicycle 18y ago
It doesn't matter if they understand what's actually cool about it, of course. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327085 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327085)

MicahWedemeyer 18y ago

I'm trying very hard to like git, being a Rails kid coming from the svn world. Still, besides the kickass merging, everything else seems ass-backwards. Remote work especially is bonkers. Push/pull? Easy. Add/Delete remote branch? Off to google for me...