Re: [dev] Why use Mercurial?

On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 4:14 AM, Matthew Bauer <mjbauer95_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> Why do Wmii and DWM use Mercurial?
> Aren't they targeted at Linux systems and isn't Git a lot faster on Linux?
> I just wanted to know, because Wmii in my opinion is one of the most Unix
> like projects out there, and I wanted to know why you'd use  Mercurial
> instead of Git.

The real answer is: pure historical accident.

At first, garbeam used svn, because he just didn't know better, after
beating him up for months about how svn totally fucking retarded crap,
we switched to darcs, which was an improvement, but had some issues,
and building it with ghc took centuries, and performance was sucky.

I don't remember the exact reason mercurial was picked instead of git,
but at the time it just seemed slightly simpler and cleaner, but a
coin toss would probably have been just as good.

Git and mercurial each have their pros an cons, but the differences
for the most part are negligible enough to be safely ignored (unless
you need to work on windows, but even that difference seems to have
faded this days).

I could rant for a while about what things in git and hg suck, but it
is not worth the trouble, they suck about the same and the only thing
that matters is to never ever use svn for *anything*, other than to
point-and-laugh and to illustrate every possible thing a software
project can do wrong.

uriel
Received on Tue Feb 16 2010 - 18:25:35 UTC