4 ms·

I wonder how much the “victory” of git vs mercurial was influenced by having a big name like Linus Torvalds behind it.

by Xenoamorphous 3y ago

VMG 3y ago
big name and big speed - I distinctly remember how slow "mercurial" was when git started dominating
- ygra 3y ago
  Since then both had lots of optimizations put into it to work outside their original intended domains. Facebook did a lot to make Mercurial performance on very large repositories tenable. Microsoft did the same for Git to allow their Windows developers to work with Git, which apparently was initially not able to do common operations at all at acceptable speed. But those are big company problems and I suspect the caveats, tradeoffs and solutions matter a lot less for the 99 % of other VCS users.
liotier 3y ago
Not just Torvalds and hosting Linux development: Git solves "big code" problems and large organizations pull the market - including tiny projects for which Git's trade-offs are not optimal, where Mercurial tended to make users happier.
bvrmn 3y ago
For me it was a quite important factor TBH in 2007 when I wanted to try something new outside of SVN. And it was my big argue point to force my company to switch to Git.
flohofwoe 3y ago
IMHO it was Github which made git popular. GH filled a gap left when Sourceforge went down the shitter, and Github was there at the right time to host open source projects for free. The actual version control system used (svn vs git) wasn't all that important. The important feature was free hosting.
- antod 3y ago
  Yeah, hardly anyone cared what Linux used (a few years earlier before Bitkeeper it was mostly just patches). But Rails was a very early Github user, and the big Rails usage upswing coincided with that and helped drive it. I was a Python and PHP dev at the time, and that other stuff mostly predated Github and was scattered across all kinds of places. Whereas Rails and Github both kicked off about the same time, and practically no Rails devs or libraries used anything else. It was that fast growth and hype combined with the network effects of Github that drove git usage rather than what Linux used. The Linux contribution workflow was also pretty alien to Github focused webdevs.
- xorcist 3y ago
  This. Free hosting has mass market appeal. It is a so much bigger market the product itself isn't terribly important. Not until the later pivot to a paid product. That's how Sourceforge rose to become so dominant it appeared unstoppable, and how Docker became immensely popular so quickly.
- jasode 3y ago
  >IMHO it was Github which made git popular. [...] The important feature was free hosting. Bitbucket also had free Mercurial hosting in 2009. I think it was 1 private repo in the free plan and it was later expanded to unlimited free repos with max 5 users around 2011.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  was there ever a github for mercurial ?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  For sure; Github was also (IMO) responsible for the rise and success of NodeJS and its dependency ecosystem, and consequently the web based front-end ecosystem we have today (angular, react, vite, etc).
gwd 3y ago
The main reason Linus didn't go with Mercurial was that Mercurial just wasn't efficient enough to do operations on the Linux repo with what Linus considered a reasonable speed. (I think it was maybe written in Python at the time?) Linus knew what the kernel was doing, so he could write a core engine that was a lot faster, and that mattered to him. So Linux was always going to be git; and I think things flowed from there.
- goku12 3y ago
  Mercurial is still written in Python. There seems to be a bit of Rust in there somewhere.
- dahart 3y ago
  Wasn’t git written by Linus and chosen for Linux development before Mercurial was announced? Is the main reason Linus didn’t choose Mercurial because Mercurial didn’t exist when the decision was made?
magicalhippo 3y ago
Having used Mercurial for years in OSS projects before switching, my view is that pull requests on Github was a major factor. There wasn't a similar offering for Mercurial, in part I think because of the fundamentally different way Git and Mercurial treated (treats?) branches. In Mercurial branches were permanent, so a PR-like flow would leave a lot of stale branches around. Mercurial also didn't support rewriting history as a core philosophical choice. It was introduced via a plugin but that meant each dev had to enable it to use it. AFAIK it has been moved into the core, but I think too late. At least as a primarily Mercurial user at the time, I feel Git didn't really outcompete Mercurial until Github and PRs came along. It just allowed for much smoother cooperation.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  Bitbucket had Mercurial pull requests. Later maybe.

I wonder how much the “victory” of git vs mercurial was influenced by having a big name like Linus Torvalds behind it.

VMG 3y ago

big name and big speed - I distinctly remember how slow "mercurial" was when git started dominating

ygra 3y ago
Since then both had lots of optimizations put into it to work outside their original intended domains. Facebook did a lot to make Mercurial performance on very large repositories tenable. Microsoft did the same for Git to allow their Windows developers to work with Git, which apparently was initially not able to do common operations at all at acceptable speed. But those are big company problems and I suspect the caveats, tradeoffs and solutions matter a lot less for the 99 % of other VCS users.

liotier 3y ago

Not just Torvalds and hosting Linux development: Git solves "big code" problems and large organizations pull the market - including tiny projects for which Git's trade-offs are not optimal, where Mercurial tended to make users happier.

bvrmn 3y ago

For me it was a quite important factor TBH in 2007 when I wanted to try something new outside of SVN. And it was my big argue point to force my company to switch to Git.

flohofwoe 3y ago

IMHO it was Github which made git popular. GH filled a gap left when Sourceforge went down the shitter, and Github was there at the right time to host open source projects for free. The actual version control system used (svn vs git) wasn't all that important. The important feature was free hosting.

antod 3y ago
Yeah, hardly anyone cared what Linux used (a few years earlier before Bitkeeper it was mostly just patches). But Rails was a very early Github user, and the big Rails usage upswing coincided with that and helped drive it. I was a Python and PHP dev at the time, and that other stuff mostly predated Github and was scattered across all kinds of places. Whereas Rails and Github both kicked off about the same time, and practically no Rails devs or libraries used anything else. It was that fast growth and hype combined with the network effects of Github that drove git usage rather than what Linux used. The Linux contribution workflow was also pretty alien to Github focused webdevs.
xorcist 3y ago
This. Free hosting has mass market appeal. It is a so much bigger market the product itself isn't terribly important. Not until the later pivot to a paid product. That's how Sourceforge rose to become so dominant it appeared unstoppable, and how Docker became immensely popular so quickly.
jasode 3y ago
>IMHO it was Github which made git popular. [...] The important feature was free hosting. Bitbucket also had free Mercurial hosting in 2009. I think it was 1 private repo in the free plan and it was later expanded to unlimited free repos with max 5 users around 2011.
agumonkey 3y ago
was there ever a github for mercurial ?
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
For sure; Github was also (IMO) responsible for the rise and success of NodeJS and its dependency ecosystem, and consequently the web based front-end ecosystem we have today (angular, react, vite, etc).

gwd 3y ago

The main reason Linus didn't go with Mercurial was that Mercurial just wasn't efficient enough to do operations on the Linux repo with what Linus considered a reasonable speed. (I think it was maybe written in Python at the time?) Linus knew what the kernel was doing, so he could write a core engine that was a lot faster, and that mattered to him. So Linux was always going to be git; and I think things flowed from there.

goku12 3y ago
Mercurial is still written in Python. There seems to be a bit of Rust in there somewhere.
dahart 3y ago
Wasn’t git written by Linus and chosen for Linux development before Mercurial was announced? Is the main reason Linus didn’t choose Mercurial because Mercurial didn’t exist when the decision was made?

magicalhippo 3y ago

Having used Mercurial for years in OSS projects before switching, my view is that pull requests on Github was a major factor. There wasn't a similar offering for Mercurial, in part I think because of the fundamentally different way Git and Mercurial treated (treats?) branches. In Mercurial branches were permanent, so a PR-like flow would leave a lot of stale branches around. Mercurial also didn't support rewriting history as a core philosophical choice. It was introduced via a plugin but that meant each dev had to enable it to use it. AFAIK it has been moved into the core, but I think too late. At least as a primarily Mercurial user at the time, I feel Git didn't really outcompete Mercurial until Github and PRs came along. It just allowed for much smoother cooperation.

pseudalopex 3y ago
Bitbucket had Mercurial pull requests. Later maybe.