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by BrenBarn 947 days ago
I hate to see more and more people switching from Mercurial to Git. The way to overcome the "network effects" is exactly for large projects like Mozilla to stand tall and say clearly that they are going to use Mercurial because it is better and git is worse.

Of course, I shouldn't really expect such from Mozilla given all the other dubious actions they've taken over time.
2 comments
zarzavat 947 days ago
Git won a long long time ago. Most people’s first VCS is now git. Mercurial is a lot better than SVN so it was able to pick up users back when SVN was dominant, but it’s not really better or worse than git it’s just down to taste. When you consider the network effects and switching costs it’s hard to convince anyone that mercurial is worth learning.
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iggldiggl 947 days ago
I initially picked up Git because that was the cool/recommended thing to do. Then I started contributing to Firefox and at that time the story for using Git with Firefox's Mercurial repository was much more cumbersome, so I gave up and started using Mercurial instead. Over time, Mercurial has grown on me and these days I actually prefer it over Git.
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jillesvangurp 947 days ago
You'd need some arguments for the assertion that mercurial is better. I think Mozilla is switching because of years of failing to come up with good arguments. And it looks like they gave it a lot of thought. That and an increasing dependence on git internally to the point where people were spending non trivial amounts of time engineering around mercurial and coming up with all sorts of hacks to enable git usage. At least, that's what the article suggests actually happened.

You'll never get consensus on X being better than Y in the tech world. There are always going to be people that insist Y is better than X. And more power to them. But you have to be realistic. There is a lot of stuff that just never gets a lot of traction. Mercurial is one of those things. It's like betamax vs. vhs.

Initially it looked promising and then Github happened and the rest is history. The whole industry now runs on Git and Mercurial sort of flat lined in terms of growth after Github started hosting essentially the entirety of the OSS world (with few but notable exceptions of course). At this point it's a hard sell for new projects and some of the larger remaining users are switching away or are considering it.

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