Re: On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development

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

On 27 March 2013 00:15, Michael Welsh Duggan <mwd@md5i.com> wrote:
> "John Wiegley" <johnw@newartisans.com> writes:
>
>> We have often debated the merits of Git vs. Bazaar, and which one the GNU
>> project should use for Emacs development.  I think now is an appropriate time
>> to revisit this decision.
>
> I see these Git versus Bazaar arguments pop up every now and then on
> this forum.  I must admit my experience with Git has been better than
> that with Bazaar, but I have to ask, why isn't Mercurial being
> considered?  From a license perspective, Mercurial is GPLv2+, while Git
> is GPLv2.  I found Mercurial's command-line UI much easier to learn and
> understand than Git, and I believe the two are fairly comparable in
> power.

We are happily using Mercurial in GNU Octave, and I heartily recommend
it to anyone, especially to GNU. The Mercurial community is dedicated
to free software as evidenced by the GPLv2 *or later* that hg has and
git doesn't, as well as things such as

    http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2011-March/037593.html

Half of the things in git's wishlist here are already in Mercurial:

    https://github.com/peff/git/wiki/SoC-2012-Ideas

Namely: git log --follow support, improved parallelism (in hg 2.6,
nearing release), git instaweb --serve, and "published" and "secret"
commits. Mercurial is overall comparable in features to git, of
comparable speed, and sometimes faster, e.g. compare the cloning time
of these two versions of gnulib:

    time git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/gnulib.git
    time hg clone http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/gnulib-hg

Both are on the same server, so at least that's not a factor. Note
that the hg link is actually web browsable. Same url for browsing as
for cloning!

I very much heartily endorse hg for Emacs. But sadly, this is a
minority opinion. I do want Emacs to move away from bzr. If you think
my Mercurial advocacy is lunacy, at least consider me an ally in
moving Emacs away from bzr. At least nowadays hg-git works well for
me, and I'll maintain an hg mirror for Emacs for anyone who wants to
use it.

> Or maybe I should just shut up before I start a new round of endless
> DCVS discussion...

Too late? :-)

- Jordi G. H.