From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
To: "Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso" <jordigh@octave.org>
Cc: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>, David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>,
emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2014 18:34:58 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20140104183458.GA3124@acm.acm> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1388857210.11337.30.camel@Iris>
On Sat, Jan 04, 2014 at 12:40:10PM -0500, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> 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.
I think bzr was somewhat lacking in good documentation and simplicity. I
found it quirky to use, and never got to like it, though clearly some
people do like it a lot.
git has prospered, I think, because it is used by Linux (just like C did
because it was used by Unix).
> 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.
There seems to have been something peculiar about bzr that it died so
suddenly. Maybe maintaining the code had become drudgery. Normally, I'd
expect a project like that to peter out over many years rather than be
abandoned abruptly like bzr was.
> 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).
Darcs is still alive though, isn't it? It would be good if Haskell
became less niche, I think.
> 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.
I agree with you about Mercurial. It is vastly superior to git in terms
of documentation and simplicity; it has a single man page written in a
lively compelling style and must surely approach closely the elusive goal
of "as simple as possible but not simpler". I selected hg for CC Mode a
couple of years ago, and don't regret the decision.
The impression I have of git (though I haven't used it) is that it is the
C++ of DVCSs - loaded up with feature after feature, many of marginal
utility. I'd love to be mistaken on this point. I do wonder if new
contributers to projects are ever discouraged by the difficulty of
learning git - it must be an order of magnitude more difficult to learn
to use effectively than CVS or Mercurial.
I would support changing to Mercurial (which I believe has a long life
ahead of it), but accept the sheer weight of numbers of those who like or
already use git makes this most unlikely.
> - Jordi G. H.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-01-04 18:34 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 72+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-01-03 21:52 Prefer Mercurial instead of git Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-04 10:11 ` David Kastrup
2014-01-04 10:20 ` David Engster
2014-01-04 10:33 ` Eric S. Raymond
2014-01-04 13:13 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-04 13:29 ` David Engster
2014-01-04 14:23 ` David Kastrup
2014-01-04 14:38 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-04 15:19 ` David Kastrup
2014-01-04 15:24 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-04 16:51 ` David Engster
2014-01-04 17:16 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-04 17:31 ` David Engster
2014-01-04 17:40 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-04 18:34 ` Alan Mackenzie [this message]
2014-01-04 19:26 ` Óscar Fuentes
2014-01-04 20:18 ` Stefan Monnier
2014-01-05 11:07 ` Leo Liu
2014-01-04 17:35 ` Eli Zaretskii
2014-01-04 18:25 ` Paul Eggert
2014-01-04 20:03 ` Eli Zaretskii
2014-01-06 12:26 ` Darren Hoo
2014-01-06 14:58 ` Stefan Monnier
2014-01-06 17:44 ` Eli Zaretskii
2014-01-06 19:33 ` Paul Eggert
2014-01-04 14:40 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-05 12:17 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-01-05 13:19 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-05 13:25 ` Florian Weimer
2014-01-05 13:55 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-05 15:38 ` Óscar Fuentes
2014-01-05 16:18 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-05 16:41 ` Eric S. Raymond
2014-01-05 17:09 ` Óscar Fuentes
2014-01-05 23:26 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-06 0:38 ` Óscar Fuentes
2014-01-06 1:01 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-06 0:03 ` David Kastrup
2014-01-05 17:54 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-01-05 23:03 ` Dov Feldstern
2014-01-05 23:23 ` Karl Fogel
2014-01-05 23:37 ` Dov Feldstern
2014-01-06 4:02 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-01-05 13:56 ` David Kastrup
2014-01-04 14:12 ` Rüdiger Sonderfeld
2014-01-04 16:08 ` Sebastian Wiesner
2014-01-04 16:41 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-04 18:37 ` David Kastrup
2014-01-04 18:44 ` Alan Mackenzie
2014-01-04 19:04 ` Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
2014-01-04 19:30 ` Óscar Fuentes
2014-01-05 16:23 ` Eli Zaretskii
2014-01-05 16:46 ` Eric S. Raymond
2014-01-05 17:03 ` Eli Zaretskii
2014-01-05 16:52 ` Óscar Fuentes
2014-01-05 17:17 ` Eli Zaretskii
2014-01-05 17:55 ` Óscar Fuentes
2014-01-05 18:07 ` Eli Zaretskii
2014-01-05 18:54 ` Óscar Fuentes
2014-01-05 21:07 ` Sean Sieger
2014-01-06 0:12 ` David Kastrup
2014-01-06 0:21 ` Rostislav Svoboda
2014-01-06 0:30 ` Karl Fogel
2014-01-06 2:24 ` Jay Belanger
2014-01-06 16:51 ` Karl Fogel
2014-01-06 17:13 ` Jay Belanger
2014-01-06 3:47 ` Eli Zaretskii
2014-01-05 3:13 ` Jay Belanger
2014-01-05 17:16 ` Sebastian Wiesner
2014-01-06 0:17 ` David Kastrup
2014-01-05 2:14 ` Karl Fogel
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2014-01-06 13:08 grischka
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