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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 Oct

by 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.