Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git

[Sebastian Wiesner <lunaryorn@gmail.com>]

2014/1/4 Rüdiger Sonderfeld <ruediger@c-plusplus.de>:
> On Friday 03 January 2014 16:52:32 Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>> I know a majority opinion lies with git due to various cultural
>> factors. I would, however, want to make a case for Mercurial being a
>> better choice for a GNU package.
>
> The Emacs community is largely using git.  I just checked which methods are
> used for `el-get' packages.  By far the largest are git based (git, github)
> with more than 61%.  The next largest is http (http, http-tar) with ~18%.
> Mercurial is used for less than 2% of the packages.
>
> Many major Emacs packages already use git: Org, Gnus, AUCTeX, ESS, GNU ELPA,
> ...
>
> As you said the main arguments are social and not technical.  And the
> community is the major social asset of any free software project.  Therefore
> it seems like a bad idea to switch to anything but git.  I think Stefan
> already made it clear that it's either git or bzr.
>
> Regards
> Rüdiger
>
> Raw data from el-get (2c93601b3c907)
>
> ((fossil . 1)
>  (go . 6)
>  (no-op . 2)
>  (cvs . 4)
>  (git-svn . 2)
>  (builtin . 11)
>  (ftp . 5)
>  (emacsmirror . 9)
>  (bzr . 10)
>  ("github" . 2)
>  (svn . 11)
>  (hg . 17)
>  (elpa . 24)
>  (http . 145)
>  (emacswiki . 89)
>  (git . 55)
>  (http-tar . 20)
>  (github . 518))
>
> I didn't count git-svn, emacsmirror for git.  And didn't check the vcs used by
> packages managed through elpa, go, or other methods.  So 62% is a rather low
> estimate.

For reference, a little grepping in the recipes of MELPA
(http://melpa.milkbox.net/) reveals a similar bias towards Git:

$ grep ':fetcher hg' * | wc -l
31
$ grep ':fetcher git' * | grep -v github | wc -l
29
$ grep ':fetcher github' * | wc -l
1186