Future of Mercurial?

[Sietse Brouwer]

On 10/03/2019 13:31, Harley Leyton wrote:
> almost never encounter anything other than git in the open source
> and commercial worlds. (I'm aware that hg is used in both, but this
> is a rare exception.) hg seems to be going very much in the direction
> of bzr, although we're clearly not there yet.
> 
> I'm interested in more positive - but realistic - perspectives.

One perspective I can offer you: you don't have to 'win' to be
successful. Git is the most-used version control system, yes, but there
are many things that matter more.

- Mercurial usage on its own terms. You could estimate this from things
   like monthly download numbers, or absolute repo activity on Rhodecode
   / Kallithea / Bitbucket. I'm not going to push my (positive) gut
   feeling when I have no data, but it's a relevant statistic you
   might want to look at, and might even be growing.

- How well Mercurial users like Mercurial. I'll bet you pounds to
   pennies that Mercurial is more loved by its users than Git is, and
   certainly less hated ;-)

- Liveness of the Mercurial development effort. Speaking as a user, I
   feel spoiled by the constant maintenance and drip-feed of smaller and
   larger improvements. Seriously: everybody on the dev team, thank you
   so very much for all you do. You are extremely live and incredibly
   good.

- The future of the Mercurial development team -- I actually have no
   idea about Mercurial's developer pool, how robust it is to people
   wanting to move on, and what its inflow of new people is. But
   it's probably a more interesting question than comparing ourselves
   to Git?

- The spread of ideas that are first tried out in Mercurial. Mercurial
   usage may or may not be spreading, but its ideas very much do, is my
   impression. Mercurial has an especially interesting relation to Git
   here: it is the VCS conceptually closest to Git [1], but its codebase
   makes it much easier to write and integrate experiments, and so
   Mercurial sees a lot more innovative work than Git does AFAICT.

   [1] Mercurial and Git both essentially operate on a DAG of commits.
       Pijul and Darcs do reorderable patches. Fossil repos also contain
       issues trackers, a wiki, a web interface -- it has a lovely
       'all-in-one' quality that reminds me of Tiddlywiki and Smalltalk.
       I don't know any closed-source VCSs.

   I also strongly suspect more Mercurial innovations have been ported to
   Git than between any other VCSs -- I can name at least two.

   * https://github.com/andrewshadura/git-crecord
   * https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb

   On the other hand, I'm still waiting for Git to sprout a log-like
   command that supports revsets and templates... I suppose 'really
   well done' is less sexy than 'innovative'.

So there you have it -- lots of meaningful dimensions in which Mercurial
is healthy and doing good things. I hope these are as positive and
realistic as you hoped for.

Kind regards,

Sietse