4 ms·

Git reminds me of the Churchill quote on democracy. It's the worst form of version control system except all the others that have been tried. Despite putting u

• wmf 14y ago
  Is Git actually better than Mercurial[1], or did it just win because Linus forced it on people? [1] Properly answering this requires imagining an alternative history where all the massive ecosystem was built around Hg instead.
  • mindstab 14y ago
    I suspect something in the magic of the execution of github has also helped a lot. Maybe it's the strong focus on social ontop of code and storage or something else but that site has probably helped a lot. Then again, even before that many big projects were falling to git from the likes of svn like Xorg and others. So it's hard to say. Maybe going back to the mailing lists of some of the big conversations might help shed more light. But yes, usually what can make a piece of software great is having some good applications, and the linux kernel was a great place for git to grow up and show off on. Maybe mercurial just suffered from less of that. Mind share seems to grow exponentially.
  • pyre 14y ago
    I don't know how active the Mercurial mailing list is, but the git mailing list was hugely active when I was on it back in 2008/2009. I can only imagine that it's gotten bigger over time. I imagine that to some extent that had at least something to do with it (though I don't claim that it was 100% of the cause).
  • micro_cam 14y ago
    If you wish to do something like import a large svn project you will find that git is dramatically faster and doesn't require you to build/acquire svn with swig bindings.
  • cdavid 14y ago
    I do think git is better than mercurial in significant ways, at least how it was circa 2010: - tag handling in hg is (was ?) horrible - I think using integers for revisions, even if just in the UI is a very confusing feature, as it gives a false sense of familiarity (hg like every DVCS I know internally uses unique ids for revisions). - too many ways to do branching that all have +/-. While you can do it in a similar way to git, you don't have all the UI that makes it so useful. - the notion of tip is a major UI wart as well. On the + for mercurial: definitely better support for cross platform, more consistant UI, better performances on windows.
  • jsight 14y ago
    I think there are tons of reasons to prefer Mercurial over git (ease of use on Windows in the early days being a big one). I also think there are a smaller number of potentially more significant reasons to prefer git. But I think it's almost completely impossible to separate the success of Git from the tools ecosystem. I really think Mercurial would have been at least as popular as git in the long run if it had something as good as Github behind it from the beginning. The benefits of Github are truly astounding.
    • wmf 14y ago
      Which then makes me wonder why they chose to start GitHub instead of HgHub. Rails may have been the reason; I'm not sure when or why Rails started using git.
  • dogweather 14y ago
    I'm using git because Github exists. Otherwise, I'd be checking out Mercurial.