Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

Posted by ibobev 2 days ago

Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video](fosdem.org)

176 points | 176 commentspage 3

bombcar 6 hours ago|

I still wish bzr had had a better showing.

jmole 9 hours ago||

hg (fig) was definitely my favorite frontend for source control at google.

7e 5 hours ago||

Mercurial is so, so slow. It is painful to use.

throwatdem12311 5 hours ago||

How is the rust rewrite going?

irishcoffee 4 hours ago||

I should write a whole article about this.

Hg is a superior tool compared to git. It logically just clicks, for everyone. Changesets, branching, merging, tagging, it all just works.

Git is this arcane blob of whatever-you-call-it where rewriting/erasing history is not only allowed, its encouraged. That is insane to me.

Git is a fine tool, it is in every possible way inferior to hg.

jgalt212 8 hours ago||

Our shop uses Mercurial, and I hop we never move to Git, but I do see us eventually moving to whatever is next.

QuadrupleA 8 hours ago||

[dead]

holoduke 7 hours ago||

Just a bit off topic. But is anyone still using git or whatever versioning in the traditional way? I hardly see myself using the git command these days. Everything I handled by Claude. From pulling to pushing to solve merge conflicts and more. In a way it doesn't matter anymore whether it's git or something else.

5aasj3t 10 hours ago|

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.

throwaway894345 10 hours ago|

Honestly hg shot themselves in the foot by not releasing any stable API and making developers use their CLI interface. Between that and the performance and dynamic typing issues of Python, it was almost sure to lose the race to Git.

Pay08 10 hours ago||

Git doesn't have any sort of API either, libgit2 is unofficial.

throwaway894345 9 hours ago||

Git's filesystem layout has always been stable and Git encouraged developers to target it. Mercurial strongly cautioned developers away from its filesystem or source code APIs and told them to subprocess out to the CLI. To be clear, I dislike Git, but it was _designed_ with developers in mind (which isn't to say that it has a nice API, only that the Git people intended for Git to be extended). I prefer Mercurial's concepts and interface, but Mercurial was somewhere between indifferent and hostile toward developers.