Re: On the popularity of git [Was: Git question: when using branches, how does git treat working files when changing branches?]

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Yuri Khan writes:

 > Mercurial’s and Bazaar’s cores, on the other hand, are much more
 > complicated,

+100  Both suffer badly from the Knuthian "root of all error".  The
insane complexity of Bazaar internals is half of what killed Bazaar.
(The other half, of course, is that almost all of its fans are like
Alan -- the last thing that they want to do is study their VCS, which
in combination with complexity preclude contribution -- and the rest
are "paperwork" refuseniks, so their contributions are refused.[1])

That doesn't seem to prevent Mercurial from being actively developed,
though.

 > and user-friendly UI (if any) is not sufficient to redeem them.

+1

I wouldn't go so far as to say "if any", but in my daily use, I find
that even though git starts out with a handicap (3 letters vs. 2 for
"hg"), I type fewer characters with git than with Mercurial.[2]  git is
more likely to DTRT for me without options than is Mercurial.  I
suspect that is true for enough users to make the "complexity of UI"
argument sort of miss the point.

One thing that Mercurial has that does seem like a clear advance in
usability over git is the "phase" concept.  I don't use it though, so
I don't value it and I can't say how somebody like Alan would value
it.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Granted, the Canonical CA was horrible (and probably still is):
it has an unrestricted grant of sublicense, so Canonical can include
your software in software you have to pay for and have none of the
software freedoms.

[2]  It occurs to me that one of the things I hated about both bzr and
hg was that a bare "$VCS commit" commits everything.  That is *almost
never* TRT for my workflow.  But I suspect that Alan loves that
feature, since he has a religious objection to commiting a workspace
that hasn't been polished to an optically perfect surface.