Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git

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

On Sat, 2014-01-04 at 11:11 +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <jordigh@octave.org> writes:
> 
> > My main argument in favour of hg is not technical, but rather social.
> > For GNU, I think it is far more important to support a project that
> > aligns with GNU's aims,
> 
> Emacs shot itself in this foot with Bzr already.

That wasn't the problem with bzr. The problems with bzr are technical,
not social. Its *algorithms* were unsalvageable.

By the way, Mercurial made a huge effort to move from GPLv2-only to
GPLv2+. They are committed to software freedom. Emacs should reward
this commitment.
 
> > I also think that Matt Mackall (mpm), hg's very active lead dev, has a
> > friendlier position towards GNU than git's maintainers do. As a
> > result, hg itself is a strong defender of free software, they take
> > active steps to enforce the GPL, and made steps towards moving to
> > GPLv2+ whereas git is not going to do so.
> 
> Bzr anybody?  git is developed and employed by a large community.

Mercurial is not small, even if it's smaller than git. It's backed by
Atlassian, Google, Facebook, Python, GNU Octave, GNU Multiprecision
Library, GNU Health, Mozilla, Pidgin. It's lively and active.

 > When we support a fringe system,

Mercurial is not fringe. It's git's biggest contender.  It is
routinely offered as an alternative to git.
 
> What are the underlying technologies? For Git, C and shell
> scripting, basically core GNU facilities. For Mercurial, Python.
> That's nicer for developers working on Windows, but what did we
> write GNU for if we are going to let our technical choices be
> dictated by Windows to all eternity?

Python is actually nicer for everyone, not just Windows. It is far
easier to hack hg than git. mpm has better *taste* in design than
Hamano and Torvalds. You can hack hg *immediately*, with a --debugger
switch. It drops you right into hg's code. It's very nice.

- Jordi G. H.