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Having used ClearCase, CVS, Subversion, TFS, Git and Mercurial, I would have to say it's because not enough people have tried Mercurial. I have no interest in G

Having used ClearCase, CVS, Subversion, TFS, Git and Mercurial, I would have to say it's because not enough people have tried Mercurial. I have no interest in Git, but I think people like GitHub (or maybe don't know about BitBucket)

debacle 14y ago
Which tool do you prefer the most?
- Tloewald 14y ago
  We assume ClearCase is the worst, right?
  - igrekel 14y ago
    Assuming too much... People who conplain loudly about ClearCase most often never understood how it is supposed to work. Ok ok, you need an army of administrators to make it work but still far from being the worst. Sourcesafe?
    - raverbashing 14y ago
      "most often never understood how it is supposed to work" This is a BS argument. Yes, everybody got it wrong, Git is wrong, SVN is wrong, it's CCs broken model that's correct. " you need an army of administrators to make it work" Yes, let's sink an awful amount of money in a half-baked software that needs all kinds of 'helpers' to work properly. Personally I won't work in a company that uses CC anymore, and it's been only bliss since then. Sourcesafe is bad, but it's a different kind of bad. And it makes even CC look good.
    - Tloewald 14y ago
      I don't have any experience of knowledge of Sourcesafe, but it wasn't in the original list ;-)
- silverbax88 14y ago
  TFS for large scale enterprise, hands-down. But I don't recommend it for small shops. (Expensive, although I know it's free for shops with 5 devs or fewer) simply because code management is easy and you can build automated deployment without having to use anything else (you can script with PowerBuilder, Ant, whatever if you like, though). The issue I've found with that is it's not easy to find people who don't code for a living but understand scripting enough to build automated deployments. I'm also not crazy about TFS' visual displays of branches - ClearCase (which is god-awful in every other way) has the best visual display of code and branches. Mercurial for anything smaller or startup. Love it. The issue with Mercurial is that you'll need to determine how you want to do automated deploy builds, but the code management is great and using BitBucket + Hg I never have trouble seeing which code I'm working in or resolving conflicts. I actually think Mercurial has the second-best visual branching display.
  - daok 14y ago
    >>TFS for large scale enterprise, hands-down. Real big enterprise cannot use TFS without being in a mess with merge. You always have to merge to a parent which require a lot of organisation. Also, it's not the fastest source control when the code base is over few gigs per branches. With over 50 developers/testers (in the same project) we had reach a bottleneck with TFS.
pooriaazimi 14y ago
To be fair, BitBucket was way uglier than GitHub until very recently (latest redesign). That's a turn-off for most people (unfortunately). The new BitBucket is awesome, though.
- krmmalik 14y ago
  Clean design inspires confidence. I looked at BitBucket about 2 years ago, and just didn't have enough confidence in it, but recently created quite a few repo's on it and am using them everyday. The new re-design makes all the difference in gaining my trust. At least that's how I see it.
- tterrace 14y ago
  Definitely. I remember checking out the BitBucket repo for pygments a while back and noticing how clunky the ui was compared to github. The new redesign at a glance seems like a huge improvement.
- BadDesign 14y ago
  Agreed! BitBucket's [http://bitbucket.org/ http://bitbucket.org/] new UI rocks!
- bhadra 14y ago
  I agree with you. Even though BitBucket allowed private repositories for free, their poor usability and interface kept users away. GitHub is not just Git. GitHub would have become popular due to its ease of use and cool user interface even if it was based on Mercurial (hg) or, may be, even Darcs. Bitbucket's latest design is good but has arrived later than expected.
pekk 14y ago
BitBucket is not even close to being as popular as GitHub, and it's not as nice for just browsing around, so the network effect is against it: you don't put code on BitBucket to be seen really. Free private repos are great, of course.
ajross 14y ago
This contains the answer for why git won: Mercurial people have "no interest" in it. What that tells me is that you have no interest in working with the community and contributing to other peoples' projects, most of which use git these days. Sure, if you want a SCM for your own team or your own private use, you can make a strong case for hg being "better". But that's not what SCM is for. Using it in your own ivory tower isn't going to impress anyone for the simple reason that no one sees it. Instead, people look at the broader world of all the interconnected git archives in the linux and web development communities, get excited, pull repos and learn git. There's just no equivalent in the hg community that I see. You guys have walled yourselves off, and it's killing your software.
- silverbax88 14y ago
  As I said, I worked with Git. I am no longer interested in it as a solution. I'm not sure why I (or any programmer) would need to 'get excited' to learn Git. It's pretty easy to understand.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - ajross 14y ago
    This still misses the point. It's not a technical problem, and you can't solve it with software. Being able to interoperate with git does nothing to convince users to use your great tool when all the cool people they know are using git. Where are the hg champions? The culture is the point, not the software.
    - garenp 14y ago
      Change the subject much? You missed the point entirely: you took one persons response and generalized it to the entire population of Mercurial users--claiming it is representative of an entire culture of that population. Then, you claim to be in possession of special knowledge as to what "SCM is for".
  - 14y ago
klibertp 14y ago
My personal favorite is Bazaar, but Mercurial is good, too. I also heard very good opinions about darcs, but didn't try it yet. Mercurial has BitBucket and Bazaar has Launchpad, so they hardly 'loose' to git and GitHub here. There is but one thing that git does better (I'm forced to use git at work) - it's faster, or at least feels faster. Other than that, on the technical side, both Bazaar and Mercurial are I think on par with git and they win hands down in terms of ease of use. So, yes, I would guess that the cause of git popularity is primarily Linus and then GitHub and then the popularity itself.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Popularity itself is an often overlooked feature. When trying to sell the use of a version control system to others (peers, coworkers, bosses, etc. Or more difficult if you are trying to make an institutional change) you are already in a better position with git than you are with mercurial. If all mercurial is bringing to the table is being a bit more pleasant, I am still going to pass over it for that reason.
  - garenp 14y ago
    I can sympathize with the difficulty of persuading others. But consider this not-so-far-fetched example: if you're choosing an open-source database, you would choose MySQL based on popularity instead of PostgreSQL, which I would argue in most cases is a mistake--which you'll likely have to live with for years.
    - solutionyogi 14y ago
      That's not a fair comparison. Mercurial is better than git in certain aspects (mainly command line experience) but git by itself is a solid content tracker. It has an extremely simple data model and it's rock solid. As someone else said in this thread, git has no separate notion of 'branch', 'tag' like Mercurial. In a way, git is actually like PostgreSQL, a solid piece of software which you can trust.
      - 14y ago
pnathan 14y ago
I have used Mercurial extensively, and I while I find its interface superior to git, I find that git actually models the kind of development I do. Also, git is accumulating tooling and integration with other tools much more than hg is, afaict.
16s 14y ago
I was a big subversion fan until I took a systems programming position where the dev team used Mercurial. It took me a few weeks to really start liking it, but now I absolutely love it. It's great.
rimantas 14y ago
> I would have to say it's because not enough people have > tried Mercurial Or maybe enough of them tried Mercurial. I know I did, then switched to git and did not look back since.
- hnriot 14y ago
  I switched to hg, found it very much the same as git, no appreciable difference to warrant moving again. code control is a solved problem and people have moved on to do other things...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

debacle 14y ago

Which tool do you prefer the most?

Tloewald 14y ago
We assume ClearCase is the worst, right?
- igrekel 14y ago
  Assuming too much... People who conplain loudly about ClearCase most often never understood how it is supposed to work. Ok ok, you need an army of administrators to make it work but still far from being the worst. Sourcesafe?
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    "most often never understood how it is supposed to work" This is a BS argument. Yes, everybody got it wrong, Git is wrong, SVN is wrong, it's CCs broken model that's correct. " you need an army of administrators to make it work" Yes, let's sink an awful amount of money in a half-baked software that needs all kinds of 'helpers' to work properly. Personally I won't work in a company that uses CC anymore, and it's been only bliss since then. Sourcesafe is bad, but it's a different kind of bad. And it makes even CC look good.
  - Tloewald 14y ago
    I don't have any experience of knowledge of Sourcesafe, but it wasn't in the original list ;-)
silverbax88 14y ago
TFS for large scale enterprise, hands-down. But I don't recommend it for small shops. (Expensive, although I know it's free for shops with 5 devs or fewer) simply because code management is easy and you can build automated deployment without having to use anything else (you can script with PowerBuilder, Ant, whatever if you like, though). The issue I've found with that is it's not easy to find people who don't code for a living but understand scripting enough to build automated deployments. I'm also not crazy about TFS' visual displays of branches - ClearCase (which is god-awful in every other way) has the best visual display of code and branches. Mercurial for anything smaller or startup. Love it. The issue with Mercurial is that you'll need to determine how you want to do automated deploy builds, but the code management is great and using BitBucket + Hg I never have trouble seeing which code I'm working in or resolving conflicts. I actually think Mercurial has the second-best visual branching display.
- daok 14y ago
  >>TFS for large scale enterprise, hands-down. Real big enterprise cannot use TFS without being in a mess with merge. You always have to merge to a parent which require a lot of organisation. Also, it's not the fastest source control when the code base is over few gigs per branches. With over 50 developers/testers (in the same project) we had reach a bottleneck with TFS.

pooriaazimi 14y ago

To be fair, BitBucket was way uglier than GitHub until very recently (latest redesign). That's a turn-off for most people (unfortunately). The new BitBucket is awesome, though.

krmmalik 14y ago
Clean design inspires confidence. I looked at BitBucket about 2 years ago, and just didn't have enough confidence in it, but recently created quite a few repo's on it and am using them everyday. The new re-design makes all the difference in gaining my trust. At least that's how I see it.
tterrace 14y ago
Definitely. I remember checking out the BitBucket repo for pygments a while back and noticing how clunky the ui was compared to github. The new redesign at a glance seems like a huge improvement.
BadDesign 14y ago
Agreed! BitBucket's [http://bitbucket.org/ http://bitbucket.org/] new UI rocks!
bhadra 14y ago
I agree with you. Even though BitBucket allowed private repositories for free, their poor usability and interface kept users away. GitHub is not just Git. GitHub would have become popular due to its ease of use and cool user interface even if it was based on Mercurial (hg) or, may be, even Darcs. Bitbucket's latest design is good but has arrived later than expected.

pekk 14y ago

BitBucket is not even close to being as popular as GitHub, and it's not as nice for just browsing around, so the network effect is against it: you don't put code on BitBucket to be seen really. Free private repos are great, of course.

ajross 14y ago

This contains the answer for why git won: Mercurial people have "no interest" in it. What that tells me is that you have no interest in working with the community and contributing to other peoples' projects, most of which use git these days. Sure, if you want a SCM for your own team or your own private use, you can make a strong case for hg being "better". But that's not what SCM is for. Using it in your own ivory tower isn't going to impress anyone for the simple reason that no one sees it. Instead, people look at the broader world of all the interconnected git archives in the linux and web development communities, get excited, pull repos and learn git. There's just no equivalent in the hg community that I see. You guys have walled yourselves off, and it's killing your software.

silverbax88 14y ago
As I said, I worked with Git. I am no longer interested in it as a solution. I'm not sure why I (or any programmer) would need to 'get excited' to learn Git. It's pretty easy to understand.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- ajross 14y ago
  This still misses the point. It's not a technical problem, and you can't solve it with software. Being able to interoperate with git does nothing to convince users to use your great tool when all the cool people they know are using git. Where are the hg champions? The culture is the point, not the software.
  - garenp 14y ago
    Change the subject much? You missed the point entirely: you took one persons response and generalized it to the entire population of Mercurial users--claiming it is representative of an entire culture of that population. Then, you claim to be in possession of special knowledge as to what "SCM is for".
- 14y ago

klibertp 14y ago

My personal favorite is Bazaar, but Mercurial is good, too. I also heard very good opinions about darcs, but didn't try it yet. Mercurial has BitBucket and Bazaar has Launchpad, so they hardly 'loose' to git and GitHub here. There is but one thing that git does better (I'm forced to use git at work) - it's faster, or at least feels faster. Other than that, on the technical side, both Bazaar and Mercurial are I think on par with git and they win hands down in terms of ease of use. So, yes, I would guess that the cause of git popularity is primarily Linus and then GitHub and then the popularity itself.

jlgreco 14y ago
Popularity itself is an often overlooked feature. When trying to sell the use of a version control system to others (peers, coworkers, bosses, etc. Or more difficult if you are trying to make an institutional change) you are already in a better position with git than you are with mercurial. If all mercurial is bringing to the table is being a bit more pleasant, I am still going to pass over it for that reason.
- garenp 14y ago
  I can sympathize with the difficulty of persuading others. But consider this not-so-far-fetched example: if you're choosing an open-source database, you would choose MySQL based on popularity instead of PostgreSQL, which I would argue in most cases is a mistake--which you'll likely have to live with for years.
  - solutionyogi 14y ago
    That's not a fair comparison. Mercurial is better than git in certain aspects (mainly command line experience) but git by itself is a solid content tracker. It has an extremely simple data model and it's rock solid. As someone else said in this thread, git has no separate notion of 'branch', 'tag' like Mercurial. In a way, git is actually like PostgreSQL, a solid piece of software which you can trust.
    - 14y ago

pnathan 14y ago

I have used Mercurial extensively, and I while I find its interface superior to git, I find that git actually models the kind of development I do. Also, git is accumulating tooling and integration with other tools much more than hg is, afaict.

16s 14y ago

I was a big subversion fan until I took a systems programming position where the dev team used Mercurial. It took me a few weeks to really start liking it, but now I absolutely love it. It's great.

rimantas 14y ago

> I would have to say it's because not enough people have > tried Mercurial Or maybe enough of them tried Mercurial. I know I did, then switched to git and did not look back since.

hnriot 14y ago
I switched to hg, found it very much the same as git, no appreciable difference to warrant moving again. code control is a solved problem and people have moved on to do other things...

deleted 14y ago

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