Re: Mercurial - Distributed SCM in Gnome (Was: Git vs SVN (was: Can we improve things?))

["Ali Sabil" <ali sabil gmail com>]

On 9/23/07, Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com> wrote:
> 2007/9/23, Ali Sabil <ali sabil gmail com>:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > > >
> > > > In my opinion Mercurial has much of the benefits of GIT but with the
> > > > ease of use of SVN.  We dropped GIT and SVN at my company in favor of
> > > > Mercurial.
> > >
> > > In what way is Mercurial simpler to use than Git? Looking quickly at
> > > the Mercurial docs it seemed quite similar to Git in terms of
> > > complexity.
> > >
> > > I've found most distributed scm's to be similarly complex (not
> > > considering early versions Git and Arch, etc). The complexity of
> > > distributed scm's are in the areas where CVS/Svn can't even operate.
> > >
> >
> > I think as well that mercurial is very easy to use compared to git,
>
> I don't get this argument, looking at
>
>   http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/QuickStart
>
> tells me that the basic commands one would use for daily development
> are almost exactly the same as in git. Am I missing something?
>
I am not talking about the command set, I am saying basically, that to
use git you need to understand its inner working otherwise you are
pretty much lost, that's definitely not the case of Mercurial nor bzr.

> > but am not sure about the merge capabilities of Mercurial. I think
> > that git complexity comes from the extension mechanism used by git :
> > none.
> >
> > Basically git is extended by writing shell scripts and perl scripts
> > that create new commands
>
> Isn't this conflicting a bit with what you just said? Furthermore, you
> can write your tools with whatever you want; Python, Perl, Ruby etc.
> With Mericurial extensions you are limited to Python. So you could say
> that the extension mechanism of git allows more options than
> Mericurial...
>
I don't know if you are serious, but do you really think that Git is
extensible ? I would rather say it got a pseudo extension mechanism :
scripts that operate on the repository.

And btw, it is technically possible to extend bzr and Mercurial using
external tools written in other languages that operate on the
repository in the same manner as Git. But I would stay away from that
: it is just plain ugly.

> > for example git-svn looks like a completely
> > separate tool, where as bzr-svn for example just integrates into bzr,
> > and any bzr command works on the svn repo as if it was a bzr repo or a
> > bzr branch.
>
> I don't see the big issue with this. git-svn is also only the glue
> from svn to git, all other work is done on the git repository as
> usual.
>
git-svn dcommit ? anyone ? In fact git-svn as a program should not
exist in the first place if git had a serious extension mechanism.

Please consider trying both bzr (>= 0.91) and mercurial, and judge by yourself.

--
Ali