"Leslie P. Polzer" <[email protected]> writes:
>> I am very much against changing VCS again.
>
> +1. While I do believe that Mercurial has to catch up with
> git in some areas the overhead of switching would far outweigh
> the benefits.
I try to have a very pragmatic approach to tools. If something works,
I'll use it, until I find something that suits my needs better.
In the weblocks/hg case, we know that darcs did not work. Hg was
chosen. I gave hg a good try and I believe it doesn't work well. Here's
why:
-- each branch is effectively a separate tree, which makes branching
artificially expensive. Also, once I clone a branch, I know of no
way to visualize where it split from weblocks-dev other than
tracking the last common changeset manually.
-- you can't maintain small topic branches effectively,
-- as a result, weblocks development has split into multiple huge
forks, instead of tiny topic branches. These mix a lot of
functionality in them and are very difficult to pick apart. It took
me a long time to pick what I needed from Leslie's
modern-dispatching fork and it wasn't a happy experience,
-- trying to co-maintain large branches alongside -dev results either
in them diverging or in a gazillion of merge commits which makes
reading history difficult,
-- last, but not least, I do not have a good visualization tool for hg
on a Mac and I haven't found an easy way to show just one changeset
diff in hg (git show does this). But that's probably just me being
stupid.
> And hg has still the edge in newbie-friendliness and (IME)
> speed.
I disagree with both, I believe the newbie-unfriendliness of git is a
myth. See http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/#easy-to-learn for a comparison
of git and hg commands. I really don't see what is easier or more
difficult with either of them. Possible differences speed are negligible
and usually in favor of git.
As to weblocks, the fact is, instead of small topic branches with
well-defined scope we ended up with long-lived large forks. I do not
think this is good, and more importantly it makes my life difficult on a
very practical level (meeting development deadlines). That is why I
decided to maintain a separate repository with a bunch of topic
branches, which git makes much easier.
Also, I do not buy the story about "the overhead of switching". I do not
see where the overhead is. In fact, apart from learning how a new VCS
works (which takes all of 10 minutes for VCS out there) there is no
overhead to speak of. We could be switching VCS systems every week and
we wouldn't really notice.
However. I do not intend to convince anyone to switch to anything. To
put it in other words: may ketchup users live long and prosper, while us
mustard users are happy with our mustard. Whatever works for you. After
all, there is no harm in exchanging patches as patches, instead of that
all-fancy pull/fetch/push thing in every VCS out there. As for me, for
the time being I will *have* to keep working with git not because I like
it more, but simply because I am unable to do the same with Mercurial.
--J.
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