Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git

["Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso" <jordigh@octave.org>]

On Sat, 2014-01-04 at 18:31 +0100, David Engster wrote:
> Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso writes:
> > bzr has its merits, and I applaud the efforts to give it a nice UI
> > efforts and its documentation is quite good, but it's obviously not
> > fit for Emacs. If it were, we wouldn't be having this discussion in
> > the first place.
> 
> You keep repeating this, and it is still wrong. We do the switch because
> Bazaar is dead.

bzr dying is a consequence of its technical demerits. If it were good
code, it would survive even in the face of git's popularity, just as
hg has survived and is doing quite well.

bzr didn't die merely because of Canonical's involvement. If people
liked it enough, they would have forked it, maintained it themselves.
It's free software. It can't be "effectively privatised", like someone
else said. Darcs has failed to be popular because it was slow and
buggy (and perhaps because Haskell is much more niche and can't
attract enough developers, but I'm not so sure about this).

But hg has great architecture, is built by a kernel hacker just like
git is, it's just as fast and somtimes faster than git, and it has a
common enough programming language that it has no trouble attracting
contributors. Like I said, mpm's devotion to keeping hg free and
GNU-friendly is also a very good point in favour.

- Jordi G. H.