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by pcwalton
948 days ago
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One of the biggest problems with Mercurial is that they took a long time for histedit to become a usable workflow. I speculate (without any evidence, so this could be entirely wrong) that this is because many Mercurial contributors preferred MQ over editing history for local patches. (Certainly I knew many Gecko developers who swore by MQ.) Coming from Git, with the git rebase --interactive flow coupled with the reflog to provide a backup to let you undo any mistakes, MQ was awful. Your choices were (1) allow hg qrefresh to overwrite the old contents of your patches and hope you never made mistakes, or (2) make your patchqueue an hg repo and have to look at second-order diffs. (I chose option (3)--symlink my patchqueue into Dropbox so that I could use Dropbox's history feature as a kind of poor man's reflog.) And to top it all off, MQ didn't understand three-way merge logic the way git rebase does. This workflow seems to me clearly worse than Git's tools, and I'll never understand why so many developers at Mozilla claimed to prefer MQ over Git. |
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The generally accepted narrative these days is that git became popular because of github (with the implicit assumption that was an arbitrary choice) and/or the Linux kernel (without much questioning of why people specifically cared about Linux's tooling for wource control).
But what I remember from ~2010 was a load of blog posts eulogizing history rewriting and how it allowed you to separate out the activities of committing changes locally in order to record the state of your work at various times, and assembling the final patch into something suitable for review by others.
Meanwhile mercurial took the stance that history rewriting is bad, and as a result people ended up using even worse solutions like `mq`, which is basically tooling around directories full of numbered patch files.
You still see that distinction in hg: once it eventually did realise that history editing is a desirable feature for many reasonable workflows it added a lot of additional complexity to the basic model, with features like phases (supposed to stop you rewriting commits that someone else might be depending on, but just using the proxy measure of "was this pushed to a 'publishing' repo") and "evolve" (which keeps a complete history of history rewrites; useful in principle for tools like code review systems to avoid the common pattern of putting a "patch id" into the commit message, but in practice felt like a lot of extra mental overhead).
So at least my view is that git made a "practicality beats purity" bet on history rewriting being a net good, and hg made the opposite bet, and eventually lost.
And back on the original topic, I used hg personally before I used git, and then professionally at Mozilla before git cinnabar came along (although by this point I was using git in other projects). So I've used mercurial a lot but actively prefer git when given a choice. Nevertheless I think this article understates just how good cinnabar is compared to the options that preceded it; apart from the case where you have a hg hash from an external system and want to find the commit locally (where you just run `git cinnabar hg2git`) it's basically totally seamless and just works without problems. It's a small tool that does one thing really well, to the extent that it's easy to overlook just how good it really is.