Thoughts on Mercurial and Git

[John Goerzen]

Hi everyone,

There's been some interesting discussion lately about Git and Mercurial.
Ted T'so, a Linux kernel hacker and maintainer of ext2/ext3, uses
Mercurial for e2fsprogs, but comments about thinking of switching it to
git here:

http://tytso.livejournal.com/29467.html

Ted is a very sensible person that I respect quite a bit, and I think
he's got some valid points.

He also commented on my post about why I'm still using Mercurial here:

http://changelog.complete.org/posts/596-Some-more-git,-mercurial,-and-darcs.html

again with some valid points.

His main complaints against Mercurial seem to be:

 * Difficulty of extending it without using Python

 * Lack of git-style in-tree branches
   (I have to say I think hg's in-tree branches don't work for my
   workflow, either)
 
 * Repository size and performance

 * Future features

I'm not planning to switch to git anytime soon, but I'm wondering what
people in this community think about all that.  Personally I think that
the repo size and performance are "nice to haves" (hg is plenty fast for
me and nearly as small at git).

But having the history of each file stored in individual history files
makes hardlinking the history pretty much useless in some cases.  (Apply
one change that impacts 50% of the files and 50% of your hardlinks have
to go away, even if you're just updating a copyright date)

I also gather that someone is working on the branching problem.

-- John