Re: Mercurial vs. git

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

Am Mittwoch, 23. September 2009 13:19:05 schrieb Sergiu Ivanov:
> > As far as I know, people who use git rather go for seperate in-repo
> > branches (which already wrecked my own repo twice, because I did
> > *something* wrong).
> 
> Yep, this statement is right at least in my case :-)
> 
> better in Mercurial, because if there is only one instance of history
> for all feature clones, you can always screw things up globally. (I
> hope I understand things correctly.)

You have different instances of the history, but all data _which isn't 
changed_ is a simple hardlink. 

> > My approach with git is "I can get a new clone" ;)
> 
> I'd guess this is inspired by the general Mercurial feature-clone
> approach :-) 

It's rather inspired by trying for more than an hour how to fix my broken repo 
and finally giving up ;) 

> > It's sadly not easy to get there.
> 
> Is it much easier to become a Mercurial guru? :-)

That depends on what you call Guru :-)

In Mercurial the learning curve is smoother: You can read up things as you 
need them, and the need for learning new things doesn't come as quickly. 

If you want to master Mercurial Queues, the convert and the notify extension, 
anonymous collaboration, ..., and writing your own extensions, you can also 
spend a lot of time on learning every possible use. 

(shameless self-advertisment: anonymous collaboration: 
- http://draketo.de/english/mercurial/anonymous-code-collaboration-freenethg
- http://draketo.de/light/english/mercurial/workflow-concept-automatic-
trusted-group-committers
:-) )

But to know enough about Mercurial for 95% of the use cases you need far less 
time than for git. A few quotes I collected to back that up: 


- I understood how to install Mercurial and how to use it in a few minutes. - 
Giorgos Keramidas

- Just works the way I expect - Paul Moore

- There isn't much to learn to be effective. - Doug Philips

- Mercurial's conceptual model is clean and simple enough to carry around in 
my head. - hgbook

- Mercurial offers an excellent "sweet spot" in terms of flexibility, 
simplicity, and speed. - Alex Martelli, Google Tech Lead.


(they should be up on http://hg-scm.org/learn-mercurial shortly - I just found 
out I didn't switch the template for the sidebar)

Best wishes, 
Arne

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Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein, 
ohne es zu merken. 
- Arne (http://draketo.de)
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