alt Hacker NewsMercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]
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Almost 20 years ago I helped our company choose between Git and Mercurial as the replacement for Subversion. Unfortunately, I helped them make the wrong choice, Mercurial.
I say wrong because clearly Git won the war and I haven't used Mercurial since then. However, I still think I made the right choice from a technical perspective; I thought Mercurial was way more user-friendly while providing all the features and performance needed. But I guess I couldn't read the future in terms of which one would win out!
I haven't used hg in years now, bitbucket discontinuing support is what killed it for me and I had no interest in self hosting.
My git usage is very basic, my gitconfig has been pretty much untouched for years but on those occasions where I get stuck or hit something I end up searching and usually get through a bunch of posts/comments/sites and wish I was using hg.
At my previous big tech employer we used to have a mercurial layer on top of our legacy version control system. I loved it, much simpler and more clear than the typical workflows I have to deal with in git. I get it that with git you have more power, but do really most teams need that?
Mercurial was safer and better. I still use it and it's still safer.
The bookmarks feature which is supposed to be the solution for short-lived branches is hard to understand though. I'm probably dumb but I can't work it out and hence the overall tool is that much less useful.
It needs a github-like website and Heptapod would be great if I could use it - I've set up a project, been unable to do anything and then had it all closed down. OTOH self-hosting is a lot more feasible nowadays with today's fibre connections.
I loved Mercurial - still do I guess as I just installed it on the Linux Mint VM I keep around for messing with Linux. The thing I really liked about it was TortoiseHg, which provides integration between Mercurial and Windows Explorer. There is a similar TortoiseGit but, at least back when I was doing serious development, it had quite a few problems.
I sincerely hope jj gets the recognition it deserves in coming years.
Anyone know what Matt Mackall is up to these days? He started Mercurial and got people involved early on with a lot of enthusiasm, you could tell he cared about what he created and the people who joined him ("hg crew"). I learned a lot from him on how to think like an engineer and saw him manage different personalities in the project in a kind and sincere way (I think this was around ~2010).
I just installed it on a Raspberry Pi (with an otherwise too-small-for-any-other purpose SSD) for use at home. I wanted something with low power consumption, and I didn't want to have a single point of failure by running it in a container alongside everything else.
The only hiccup was forgetting that when pushing via the SSH connection, it will have paths relative to the home directory of my hg user.
IIRC Facebook switched to HG from SVN in the 2010s, one (main?) motivator being that the single repo was getting too big and svn’s only way was to start splitting it up. Which was against the philosophy of openness of the single repo. No idea what’s Meta doing now.
I am glad the Hginit is back https://hginit.github.io/index.html
Not sure why it has to disappear in the first place.
What's going on with hginit.com now ?
In my time with it, about ~20 years ago, it had a lot of nice features for instance hg came with a web server/interface out of the box.
Mercurial is just better than Git. But GitHub won and so Git won.
hg (fig) was definitely my favorite frontend for source control at google.
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Mercurial was the only Python application that worked, so van Rossum and crew did not like it and had to move to git and then GitHub (Ruby).
Python developers, especially core are used to perpetually broken software and don't like stuff that just works. As long as the software is in Python - C (git) and Ruby (websites that used to work at that time) are fine.
My first full time job after university was using hg, and particularly https://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/ made it really pleasant.
Prior and post that I'd always used git but I'll always have a bit of a soft spot for mercurial, especially as our forge usage at the time predated strict guardrails and controls - we did code review, but it was your responsibility to tag the appropriate people and wait for them to respond, if you felt it was necessary to merge prior to that you could - but better be ready to defend that decision.