Shipping hg-git by default?

[Kastner Masilko, Friedrich]

From: anatoly techtonik [mailto:techtonik at gmail.com] 
>
> That's the thing I am trying to fix. My incentive is to waste less time on fighting with workflow by using tools that provide the best user experience for me.
> So far Mercurial was winning. But I frequently patch things on a freshly > deployed box and setting up and tuning Mercurial for working with Git is more
> hassle than just launching Git + StackOverflow in separate window.

I don't understand that. Either you have an incentive (using the better workflow provided by Mercurial), or you have none. What is it? Or was it just a rhetorical vehicle to threaten developers with another lost user?

Mercurial is not winning, Git is. If there ever was something to "win", that is. As things are now, Git provides the best user interface for working with GitHub and yes, even Bitbucket. If you chose Git as repository format - which is mandatory on GitHub and the highly encouraged option on Bitbucket- you can use all features of the platforms. If you use Mercurial to access them, you practically have to fight against the tool.

Don't get me wrong: hg-git is a wonderful extension, and my hat is off to all the maintainers of this software. I often use it myself, basically to clone Git repos to check version history and play around with projects. However, I used it as full-fledged bridge only once, ran into a multitude of problems (different hashes, history rewrite is a PITA, no octopus merges, etc.), and stopped using it that way. Nowadays, if I want to contribute to a Git-based project, I just use Git and be done with it.

Using Mercurial on Git-based projects just for the sake of using Mercurial smells too much like Dogma-Driven-Development for me TBH. The workflows are not that much different, just Git's command-line is ugly as hell.

> It is not about making HG more like Git, it is about making GitHub more like HG server.

If it is about making GitHub like a HG server, then this is certainly the wrong address. I think you have to ask GitHub for that.
 
On the subject of including hg-git in the default installation I'd like to point out that hg-git is dependent on dulwich AFAIK. If a change in Git breaks dulwich functions, you'd have to hope that the dulwich project gets updated quickly, so you can include it in your extension that is included in the main project. In other words: Mercurial would tie itself to Git's release cycle. I think this is also one of the reasons why the Git project left out the various bridges/converters from its tree years ago.



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