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

["Sean Kelley" <svk sweng gmail com>]

On 9/22/07, Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com> wrote:
> 22 sep 2007 kl. 16.05 skrev Sean Kelley:
>
> Hi,
>
> > On 9/16/07, Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com> wrote:
> >> 16 sep 2007 kl. 04.40 skrev Curtis Hovey:
> >>
> >>> On Sat, 2007-09-15 at 21:44 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> >>>> On Sun, 2007-09-16 at 01:10 +0200, Ali Sabil wrote:
> >>>>   - Keith Packard did a fairly extensive research of which DSCM
> >>>> system
> >>>> to use for xorg and other fd.o projects, from a storage
> >>>> robustness /
> >>>> performance point of view, and he wrote this excellent piece:
> >>>>
> >>>>   http://keithp.com/blog/Repository_Formats_Matter.html
> >>>
> >>> This document is a year old; projects that are under heavy
> >>> development
> >>> like Bazaar are misrepresented. For instance bzr has changed it's
> >>> repository format, and is much faster that it was a year ago.
> >>
> >> In fairness, so is Git. It's perceived complexity is to a large part
> >> based on people trying it out a long time ago while it is as well
> >> being developed and higher level abstractions are added.
> >
> >
> > 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 think the complexity in GIT is a result of the fact that the overlay
of cogito is no longer maintained and you have to deal with a variety
of commands from git-core.  You are dealing with a multitude of
commands and options that were never really designed for an end-user
developer in mind.  Should I do x, y, or z?  Carl Worth has done a
brilliant job at pointing out those deficiencies on the GIT mailing
list based in no small part on his experience getting new developers
going with GIT for Cairo.

I am not saying that one is necessarily the best for everyone.  When I
looked at SCMs for my company we, like everyone else, opted for
Subversion.  I instead had our kernel hackers use GIT.  I think just
having to help half a dozen people use GIT was an incredible burden on
our resources.  At the same time I did not want to have to support two
different SCMs - GIT for the kernel hackers/experienced hackers and
SVN for the unwashed masses.  I needed something that would not cause
cries of anguish and outrage.  A lot of my developers also work on
Windows desktops.  Show me where GIT works on Windows without Cygwin.
Mercurial works best for us.

Mercurial has been picked up by Mozilla, OpenSolaris, Xine, Alsa, etc:

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/ProjectsUsingMercurial

Like Subversion, Mercurial maintains an online book:

http://hgbook.red-bean.com/

I think GIT is not a very user friendly SCM for those coming from
other version control systems.  It is far too rough around the edges.
Will it get better?  I am sure over time it will.  But I certainly
wouldn't impose it on the multitude of Gnome developers who have
varying degress of SCM experience from the git go. :-)

my 2cents

Sean



>
> 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.
>
> Cheers,
>    Mikael Hallendal
>
> >
> > Sean
> >
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >>    Mikael Hallendal
> >>
> >> --
> >> Imendio AB, http://www.imendio.com
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> >> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> >> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
> >>
>
>
>
> --
> Imendio AB, http://www.imendio.com
>
>
>
>