Re: [dev] Why use Mercurial?

On 2010-02-14, Christoph Schied <Christoph.Schied_AT_uni-ulm.de> wrote:
> git's architecture is is nicely layered so that one can use very
> lowlevel stuff but one also can combine it to more comfortable tools
> like git does it. The bloat you are talking about is mostly in small
> scripts that are layered above git core functionality. And mercurial
> does have many "bloat" and plugins in its core distribution as well. And
> i think every suckless-alarm-bell should ring when you merely can hear
> the word python ;)

Don't be absurd. Python is a fairly reasonable high level
language. It makes it easy to write dense and readable code. It
definitely has some speed and memory disadvantages over C, but
those aren't a major issue when it comes to Mercurial. The CPU
intensive parts of the core are written in C, and the end result
is a very fast and efficient VCS.

As for bloat, as you've mentioned, Mercurial's bloat is mostly
factored out into plugins. The core is generally simple,
elegant, and easy to understand. There are definitely advantages
to git's core, but simplicity is not among them. There may be
simple ways to do a lot of common tasks, but finding them is
nearly impossible. The whole suite is very, well, GNU.
Received on Sun Feb 14 2010 - 15:18:40 UTC