by awesome_dude 4 days ago
Whatever your opinion on one tool or another might be - it does seem weird that the "market" has been captured by what you are saying is a lesser product.
IOW, what do you know that nobody else does?
So far you've only gotten responses to "how can a worse product win?", and they are valid, but honestly the problem here is that Mercurial is not a better product in at least one very important way: branches.
You can visit any resource about git and branches will have a prominent role. Git is very good at branches. Mercurial fans will counter by explaining one of the several different branching options it has available and how it is better than the one git has. They may very well be right. It also doesn't matter, because the fact that there's a discussion about what branching method to use really just means Mercurial doesn't solve branches. For close to 20 years the Mercurial website contained a guide that explained only how to have "branches" by having multiple copies of the repository on your system. It looks like the website has now been updated: it doesn't have any explanation about branches at all that I can find. Instead it links to several different external resources that don't focus on branches either. One of them mentions "topic", introduced in 2015. Maybe that's the answer to Git's branching model. I don't care enough to look into it. By 2015 Git had long since won.
Mercurial is a cool toolbox of stuff. Some of them are almost certainly better than git. It's not a better product.
This is so strange, because, at a low level, a branch isn't even a "thing" in git. There is no branch object type in git, it's literally just a pointer to a commit, functionally no different from a tag except for the commands that interact with it.
Meanwhile mercurial has bookmarks. TBF I'm not sure when it got those but they've been around forever at this point. The purpose is served.
I think there are (or perhaps were) some product issues regarding the specifics of various workflows. But at least some of that is simply the inertia of entrenched workflows and where there are actual downsides the (IMO substantial) advantages need to be properly weighed against them.
Personally I think it just comes down to the status quo. Git is popular because it's popular, not because it's noticably superior.
> I think there are (or perhaps were) some product issues regarding the specifics of various workflows.
I love jumping in discussions about git branching, because that's a very objective and practical area where git made the playing field worse. Less and less people feel it, because people old-enough to have used branch-powered VCSes have long forgotten about them, and those who didn't forget are under-represented in comparison to the newcomers who never have experienced anything else since git became a monopoly.
Anyhow, let's pick django as a project that was using a VCS with branches before moving to git/github, and have a look at the repo history: https://github.com/django/django/commits/stable/6.0.x
Yes, every commit is prefixed with the branch name. Because, unlike mercurial, git is incapable of storing this in its commit metadata. That's ridiculous, that's obscene, but that's the easiest way to do it with git.
Just because there is one project apparently using this in a way that indicates someone could perceive something as a weakness... It doesn't mean it's a real weakness (nor that it's serious).
You can just not move branches. But once you can do it, you will like it. And you are going to use
git branch --contains COMMIT
Git's model is clean and simple, and makes a whole lot of sense. IMHO.
> Less and less people feel it, because people old-enough to have used branch-powered VCSes have long forgotten about them, and those who didn't forget are under-represented in comparison to the newcomers who never have experienced anything else since git became a monopoly.
I'm old enough to have used SVN (and some CVS) and let me tell you branching was no fun, so much that we didn't really do it.
That's the definition of a tree though. Everything has a parent, no cycles allowed.
To me mercurials branching is closer to the development process and preserves more information, because it records the original branch a commit was made.
Git does not have such concept. That is a trade off and that trade off works great for projects managed like Linux kernel. But for smaller projects where there is a limited number of people working, the information preserved by mercurial could be very valuable.
It also had some really interesting ideas like change set evolution, which enabled history re-writing after a branch has been published. Don't know its current status and how well it turned out to be..
Just FTR - git /can/ store that information, but it requires human input.
If you rebase the feature branch into the main branch THEN follow it up with the merge commit that records the branch name you store the branches (that have been made a part of main) and can see where they are in your log
Mercurial's notes can become cumbersome if there are a large number in the repository, but, obviously, humans can sort that out if it gets out of hand
It's interesting that branches, which is a marquee feature of git, became less important at the same time as git ate all the other vcs. Outside of OS projects, almost all development is trunk based with continuous releases.
Maybe branching was an important reason to adopt git but now we'd probably be ok with a vcs that doesn't even support them.
Trunk based development is still a hotly debated topic. I personally prefer branches at this point in time, trunk based development has caused me more trouble than it's claimed worth in the past, BUT that could be a me limitation rather than a limitation of the style
Not sure if it's true. I mean, I do agree with the core of it, but how do you even do PRs and resolve conflicts, if there are no branches and a developer cannot efficiently update his code against the last (remote) version of master branch?
Trunk based development has every developer in the company committing straight to main - no PRs, supposedly no merge conflicts (but reality is that main moves fast and if someone else is working in the same files as someone else, there will be merge conflicts)
A middle ground is small PRs where people are constantly rebasing to the tip of main to keep conflicts to a minimum
Worse products win all the time. Inertia is almost impossible to overcome. VHS vs Betamax is a classic. iPod wasn’t the best mp3 player but being a better mp3 player wasn’t enough to claw market share.
Google and Meta don’t use Git and GitHub. Sapling and Phabricator much much better (when supported by a massive internal team)
What was the better mp3 player than the iPod?
unironically Zune is goated in its own way
anything from Cowon. Always has been
sansa clip+
Anything from iriver.
Network effects and marketing can easily prevent better tools from winning.
I mean, in the fickle world that is TECH, I am struggling to believe that that's what's happened.
I personally went from .latest.latest.latest.use.this (naming versions as latest) to tortoise SVN (which I struggled with) to Git (which I also was one of those "walk around with a few memorised commands" people that don't actually know how to use it) to reading the fine manual (well 2.5 chapters of it) to being an evangalist.
I've tried Mercurial, and, frankly, it was just as black magic as Git was to me.
That's network effects.
But my counter is - I've not found Mercurial to be any better, not at all.
I have made multiple attempts to use it, but it's just not doing what I want.
And that's why I'm asking, is it any better, or not.
Mercurial has a more consistent CLI, a really good default GUI (TortoiseHg), and the ability to remember what branch a commit was made on. It's a much easier tool to teach to new developers.
Hmm, that feels a bit subjective - I'm not going to say X is easier than Y when I've just finished saying that I found both tools to have a lot of black magic happening.
But what I will point out, for better or worse, people are now looking at LLMs as Git masters, which is effectively making the LLM the UI which is going to have the effect of removing any assumed advantage of whichever is the "superior" UX
I do wish to make absolutely clear that I personally am not yet ready to completely delegate VCS work to LLMs - as I have pointed out I have what I like to think of as an advanced understanding of the tools, which affords me the luxury of not having an LLM shoot me in the foot, that is soley reserved as my own doing :)
Networking effects are significantly strengthened by necessary user buy in. VC is hard, and every tool demands its users to spend a non-significant amount of time learning it. I would guess the time to move from black magic to understanding most of git is ~100h for most people.
The thing is, to understand which one is actually better, you would have to give the same amount of investment in the second tool, which is not something most people are willing to do if the first tool is "good enough". That's how Python became the default programming language; people don't miss features they do not understand.
A little over a decade ago, with only svn experience, I tried both mercurial and git. There was something about how mercurial handled branches that I found extremely confusing (don't remember what), while git clicked immediately - even without reading the manual.
So at least for me, git was clearly better.
Mercurial later added bookmarks which work like Git branches. These make more sense to me as well.
Did bookmarks moved as you made commits, like a branch pointer in git does?
GitHub had a business model where public repos were free. BitBucket didn’t.
That’s it. That’s why git won, you could put up open source libs with one for free and not the other.
Which is extra funny as the centralized service was the most important part of decentralized version control.
>the centralized service was the most important part of decentralized version control.
I've often thought this about github
JWZ is still blocking traffic from HN so you can't click to read this but you can copy/paste it into a new tab or open it in a incognito window:
That worse is better, and some people don't know better or care.
"better" in that sentence is very specific. Worse is also worse, and if you're one of the people for whom the "better" side of a solution doesn't apply, you're left with a mess that people celebrate.
Welcome to VHS and Betamax. the superior product does not always win the market.
Not always, but in this case the superior product (i.e. VHS) won. At initial release, Beta could only record an hour of content, while VHS could record 2 hours. Huge difference in functionality. The quality difference was there, but pretty modest.
I suppose one lesson could be that there are different dimensions of superiority, different products may be superior in different ways.
Of course, products also can win market dominance for reasons external to the product's quality itself (marketing, monopoly lock-in, other network effects, consumer preferences on something other than product quality itself, etc).