| I could go into some detail here why Git is the harder to use system of the two, but I think that would miss the bigger point. IMO, the larger and longer-term problem is that (open source) version control systems seem to be mostly stuck in the early aughts. This may sound provocative, but in principle, Git and Mercurial don't offer much that wasn't already part of Monotone. Meta/Facebook has really been the only actor I am aware of who has been really pushing the envelope in terms of making open source version control more convenient. If you think I'm being needlessly provocative, just consider this simple example: why don't version control systems (especially ones that can change history) have undo/redo functionality out of the box? I've only seen this as a Facebook extension for Mercurial that never made it into the Mercurial proper (and survived only as part of Sapling). This is an essential feature of every basic editor nowadays and it is not easy to implement for a VCS, but it's still mind-boggling that after nearly two decades, it isn't considered core functionality of a VCS. Recovering from mistakes remains a pain point in pretty much any VCS, but shouldn't be. Commit graph visualization is another problem that's just not handled very well by either Git or Mercurial and hasn't really improved much since their early incarnations, if at all. "git log --graph" or "hg log -G" don't really produce output fit for human consumption if you have even a moderately complex branch structure. Version control systems are still generally very low-level, giving you a lot of primitives and very few high-level operations that aim at making complex workflows less complex. |
It's true. And Jujutsu has undo functionality out of the box, too. It's not just Sapling. :) https://github.com/martinvonz/jj