by jorams 3 days ago
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