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Whether or not hg is good or even better than git is pretty much irrelevant at this point. Github's popularity has made all other project hosting platforms irr

by DasIch 12y ago

Whether or not hg is good or even better than git is pretty much irrelevant at this point. Github's popularity has made all other project hosting platforms irrelevant. Git's popularity means that every potential contributor knows how to use it, which significantly reduces friction for new ones.

jordigh 12y ago
I don't buy the popularity argument. If I were to abandon software just because it wasn't as popular as the alternative, I would have to stop working on GNU Octave in favour of Matlab, and I would have to wipe GNU/Linux from my machines and just use Mac OS X or Windows. I understand that git transcends organisation, programming languages, and operating systems. I still don't want to be stuck to the git way of doing things, no matter how popular it is. Concessions have to be made for git users coming to hg, but there are some things that hg does that git just will probably never be able to. I may one day work on improving hgit, which is an hg front-end to a git storage backend proof-of-concept, but so far the hg-git workaround for git's popularity is good enough for most purposes.
- DasIch 12y ago
  Popularity is a strong argument. It's however not the only argument. In the case of git and hg popularity is important because the other arguments are too weak to matter in comparision. That's not the case for GNU Octave or Linux. Those offer significant financial, ideological and technical benefits over alternatives. Benefits a large part of their user base actually cares about. Hg doesn't have that luxury. Git is simply good enough and hg is not good enough to offset the cost for choosing the unpopular option.
stephenr 12y ago
By this logic, Java and .net and php and sql are all irrelevant because all the cool kids use nodejs and mongodb, right? The HN crowd loves to chase what's "trendy" without thought for if it's a good fit for their problem. GitHub frankly is a terrible solution for anything but an open source project, and even then there are plenty of better alternatives. if your project relies on the popularity of GitHub to attract contributors I would be more worried about the nature of your contributors than where the code is hosted.
- DasIch 12y ago
  Not at all. Java, .NET, PHP and SQL all offer features that Node.JS and MongoDB do not. I also don't think that GitHub is a universally perfect solution. It's clearly not and I never said they were. Using GitHub's popularity as a marketing measure is also not a binary choice between not using it at all and relying on it completely.
  - stephenr 12y ago
    Mercurial offers features Git doesn't, but you claimed that's irrelevant because of the network effect of GitHub
    - DasIch 12y ago
      In the context of choosing a DVCS for an open source project.
      - gizmogwai 12y ago
        Uh. Do you mean that, because a project is open source it has to limit itself to the lowest common denominator (not targeting git specifically here) rather than aspire to a better/more suited toolchain that its community believe in? And by the community, I do not count those not having made any contribution but complaining about what is there in the first place. This case is about the toolchain, but the same could be set about the code. Does it has to stick to an imperative form, as it is the most common widespread and understood paradigm, or can it be functional because it fits best the original design? As long as the API is clean and the documentation is clear, I'm fine making the little extra effort to enter the world of the author rather than him/her lowering his/her expectation about what the project, as a whole, should be.
    - the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
      I think for an open source project git itself has some nice features that are severely lacking in hg. Since I switched to git I never looked back and handling of pull requests has become a breeze. In hg times I actually shuffled around with mq and manually applied patches because managing other people's remotes in light of named branches was a nightmare.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
It's quite humorous to think about how Git's popularity is as a result of a platform that in many ways subverts its interface and even core architecture of being distributed. Is it a Pyrrhic victory, I cannot tell.

by DasIch 12y ago

jordigh 12y ago

I don't buy the popularity argument. If I were to abandon software just because it wasn't as popular as the alternative, I would have to stop working on GNU Octave in favour of Matlab, and I would have to wipe GNU/Linux from my machines and just use Mac OS X or Windows. I understand that git transcends organisation, programming languages, and operating systems. I still don't want to be stuck to the git way of doing things, no matter how popular it is. Concessions have to be made for git users coming to hg, but there are some things that hg does that git just will probably never be able to. I may one day work on improving hgit, which is an hg front-end to a git storage backend proof-of-concept, but so far the hg-git workaround for git's popularity is good enough for most purposes.

DasIch 12y ago
Popularity is a strong argument. It's however not the only argument. In the case of git and hg popularity is important because the other arguments are too weak to matter in comparision. That's not the case for GNU Octave or Linux. Those offer significant financial, ideological and technical benefits over alternatives. Benefits a large part of their user base actually cares about. Hg doesn't have that luxury. Git is simply good enough and hg is not good enough to offset the cost for choosing the unpopular option.

stephenr 12y ago

By this logic, Java and .net and php and sql are all irrelevant because all the cool kids use nodejs and mongodb, right? The HN crowd loves to chase what's "trendy" without thought for if it's a good fit for their problem. GitHub frankly is a terrible solution for anything but an open source project, and even then there are plenty of better alternatives. if your project relies on the popularity of GitHub to attract contributors I would be more worried about the nature of your contributors than where the code is hosted.

DasIch 12y ago
Not at all. Java, .NET, PHP and SQL all offer features that Node.JS and MongoDB do not. I also don't think that GitHub is a universally perfect solution. It's clearly not and I never said they were. Using GitHub's popularity as a marketing measure is also not a binary choice between not using it at all and relying on it completely.
- stephenr 12y ago
  Mercurial offers features Git doesn't, but you claimed that's irrelevant because of the network effect of GitHub
  - DasIch 12y ago
    In the context of choosing a DVCS for an open source project.
    - gizmogwai 12y ago
      Uh. Do you mean that, because a project is open source it has to limit itself to the lowest common denominator (not targeting git specifically here) rather than aspire to a better/more suited toolchain that its community believe in? And by the community, I do not count those not having made any contribution but complaining about what is there in the first place. This case is about the toolchain, but the same could be set about the code. Does it has to stick to an imperative form, as it is the most common widespread and understood paradigm, or can it be functional because it fits best the original design? As long as the API is clean and the documentation is clear, I'm fine making the little extra effort to enter the world of the author rather than him/her lowering his/her expectation about what the project, as a whole, should be.
  - the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
    I think for an open source project git itself has some nice features that are severely lacking in hg. Since I switched to git I never looked back and handling of pull requests has become a breeze. In hg times I actually shuffled around with mq and manually applied patches because managing other people's remotes in light of named branches was a nightmare.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

It's quite humorous to think about how Git's popularity is as a result of a platform that in many ways subverts its interface and even core architecture of being distributed. Is it a Pyrrhic victory, I cannot tell.