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 still use mercurial for all my personal project where I don't need to care what anyone else thinks. It is pleasant to use good tools, just like I like to buy top quality rachets or such.
The Mercurial CLI has clear, well named commands that are predictable and easy to memorize. hg histedit is clean and easy to use and visually shows you what is going to happen - what the new order will be - nondestructively.
The Git CLI requires you to understand its internal data structures to understand the difference between a rebase and a merge, and most people still can't explain it.
I've worked with Mercurial for 5+ years and no one on my team has ever given up on a client and done rm -rf to start anew. Every single git user I've talked to has done that multiple times.
It was a much less stressful tool to use and git hasn't really got much better since then - I've just converted a repo to git and the team using it have had about 4 unpleasant mistakes in the last week as they adapt.
As for speed.....I cannot say I ever noticed any problem. Waiting around for the version control system has never been an issue for me.......except a git repo with 70,000 commits and we worked out how to merge a lot of those to fix the problem.
One of the big criticisms I've seen levied against Rust is that refactoring is extremely difficult, so prototyping on ideas in the language itself is a poor experience.
I've personally had great success using python, then gradually rewriting the tool I have with py03 to "oxidise" the program iteratively.
Starting with C was great for performance of Git, but damn if it's not a terrible UX these days, I can believe that the choice of toolchain and language was a contributor to that fact.
This fallacy again. Tell me, when did Mercurial decide "ok the prototype is done, we'll rewrite it in a proper language"?
They didn't, of course. Because nobody ever does. Your "prototype" gradually becomes a 100k line product that you can't afford to rewrite.
(I guess you can YOLO it with AI these days but that wasn't an option for Mercurial.)
> Starting with C was great for performance of Git, but damn if it's not a terrible UX these days
Git's terrible UX doesn't have anything to do with C. C doesn't make you always pick a different flag for "delete".
Another contender is Jujutsu (jj) which allows you to use jj as frontend and use Git as the backend (with the potential to support any backend, e.g. Google's proprietary Piper), with the best ergonomic and the widest availability of hosting solutions.
But to offer a point I haven't heard from anyone before: at least I feel that I am done with it, I learned this tool sufficiently and I can move on with my life. From time to time I add something to my git toolbelt. I feel if Mercurial or anything else have won, I would maybe have to learn another tool in 5 years, whatever else got popular, and another in next 5 years. But now I have everything I need in git, and always have needed. I hold some hope in it that perhaps the learning curve was worth it.
I’m glad there is one clear winner and we’re not in the common position of having 2-3 relevant/semi-relevant choices that you’re frequently asked to switch between depending on which project you’re looking at at the moment.
Git is modern version control, whatever you think of it, and there’s a simplicity to that.
Mercurial had bookmarks that were roughly the same as git branches.
The linear version numbers were quite useful to reason about and use in places that call for a "number" version number, and were useful relative to your "master" clone. That was not the primary way though, it had hashes like git too, that were the same from clone to clone.
And then, when you pull someone else’s in-progress work to inspect it, you end up with their branches showing up with their names and you ended up with revisions 13564-13592 belonging to someone else and showing up in your history graph even when you continue on your own work at revisions 13563 and 13593. I ended up using temporary clones and strip a lot.
git branches, in contrast, are delightfully unobtrusive.
For a complicated long running feature branch I can see it. Instead of repeatedly merging the root in during development it can be cleaner. Tools aren’t always good at figuring out in a PR what was written and what was caused by those merges from root. And history looks better at the end.
For a short branch that can merge cleanly or perhaps very close to it, I’d kind of rather have the ‘true’ history. I don’t think it’s worth it.
I’ve never understood the “everything must be rebased before every merge” desire.
"For a complicated long running feature branch" always simpler to repeatedly merge main into dev, easier conflicts solving etc
For simpler cases squash+rebase as default merge strategy trumps leaves a nice clean history.
What does “far better tooling” mean exactly, could you give an example of what amazing tools I’m missing out on (never have used anything else but git, when I came to the industry it was already the standard)
TortoiseHG is a very good client that covers all common Mercurial operations and then some. It's on par with a couple of commercial git clients that I've used. On the server side, there's e.g. heptapod as a GitLab fork that has a deep Mercurial implementation.
It means that git invented a bunch of new jargon and ideas that confuses people exposed to it for the first time, where hg's usage metaphor hews closer to the received wisdom of people coming from stuff like subversion and perforce.
It's true that git's ad hoc command line UI isn't exactly it's greatest strength. But given the complexity of the design space here that's a pretty weak argument IMHO. The two weeks it takes to get the basic git workflow into your muscle memory pale in comparison to the years it'll take you to be good at bisection and tree maintainership.
It's also sort of a wrong argument in the modern world. People new to git have extensive assistive technologies available. There is, after all, no HgHub out there.
I recall checking Mercurial back in the day and being puzzled by the lack of basic features such as the ability to stash changes. I also recalled that the community was dismissive of the lack of such a basic feature, with comments such as users could always create local branches, of even we could perhaps install a module such as shelve.
That was the image that Mercurial left with me with regards to git: missing critical features and not bothering to bridge the gap.
The plugins were usually shipped with mercurial so you didn't have to install them separately, but you needed to know that you had to enable them in a config. And I beleive this turned a lot of people off.
I think some of the extensions were very basic stuff like graph logging and colorized output -- and mq like you said. So it was kind of unfortunate that people got a bad impression of hg from that and bounced off.
20 years ago, Mercurial was not the wrong choice.
- Its internal design was very similar to Git's.
- Its cross-platform support was superior to Git's. (Git didn't get good Windows support until some years later.)
- Its ergonomics were superior to Git's, which was an important factor on its own, and especially important when trying to get a whole organization to retrain and retool around a distributed model.
- (It had a third major advantage over Git that I unfortunately cannot recall at the moment.)
So you weren't wrong back then...
...but Git improved over time, tipping the scale closer to a balanced state. It also had unbeatable author recognition, making it the obvious choice for anyone unaware of Mercurial's advantages, and eventually leading it to benefit from the network effect. And GitHub appeared, vastly improving Git's ecosystem with no support for Mercurial.
I agree about the Windows support. hg serve was also nice. Plus TortoiseHg.
One of the first things I did was switch us to git.
Mercurial was way easier to use and fit our use case but all the tooling was built for git.
(Hopefully this comes across as curious, which it is, and not antagonistic, which its not)
That means pretty much everyone who comes in the door needs Mercurial training, whether formal or informal. You’d get the same effect from still using CVS, SVN, or other things.
That may not be a big issue. If someone understands version control I’d hope they could adapt to another minder pretty fast.
It’s still an issue. There is technically a cost.
I have not used mercurial (though heard good things about it) but I saw a similar thing play out in Rust gamedev. There are 2 competing game engines, one better technically, the other much more popular. Now, if everyone made a purely technical decision, they'd pick the first one and eventually it would become the more popular one. Unfortunately, whenever I asked people why they chose the second one, they said because it was more popular. Tragedy of the commons.
If it's any consolation, maybe jj will take over. I haven't tried it yet (I use the staging area a lot in my workflow), but AFAIK they made the choice to be git-compatible which means it's not a choice between one or the other but lets people and teams migrate gradually.
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.
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.
Git has so many gotchas, bells and whistles that whenever I'm doing something out of the ordinary I'm wondering if there isn't an easier / canonical / smarter way I should be doing it.
It was also fast and had very clean, easy to contribute to code. I remember submitting a patch and getting a bit of Python education from Matt, which was very useful.
Git is fine but it's inconsistent enough in the interface department, even after all this time, that I still get regularly frustrated. On the other hand, you can't just break a workflow that already exists and I very much appreciate it scales to work far beyond mine.
I do like that the git people are doing the difficult work of improving the UI over time - it's hard to change the engines while the plane is flying!
What? Subversion is by far the most complex versioning software I've ever used.
> Git has so many gotchas, bells and whistles
The Git UI leaves a little to be desired. But inside, Git is basically just blobs, trees, commits, and refs. It'd be hard (or impossible?) to find a conceptually simpler versioning system.
Show a diff: svn diff / git diff
Show log with diffs: svn log --diff / git log --patch
Git calling the same or similar things different (or just terrible - tree-ish? ref?) names is one of the worst things about Git.
[1] https://repo.mercurial-scm.org/hg-stable/rev/d4ba4d51f85f
I owe her and the Mercurial community a great debt. The community taught me how to think like an engineer building infrastructure and the importance of backwards compatibility, something I've tried to carry forward in tools like cargo-nextest.
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.
FWIW the Sapling frontend can also be connected to a Git backend, and I've been using that for all my open source projects to get the best of Mercurial's user experience niceness while collaborating via GitHub <3
Not sure why it has to disappear in the first place.
What's going on with hginit.com now ?
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.