[cryptonector]

I wonder this too. My guess is that he did not like "heavyweight" branching and the lack of cherry-pick/rebase. At any rate that is why I didn't like it back then.

Sun Microsystems (RIP) back then went with Mercurial instead of Git mainly because Mercurial had better support for file renames than Git did, but at Sun we used a rebase workflow with Mercurial even though Mercurial didn't have a rebase command. Sun had been using a rebase workflow since 1992. Rebase with Mercurial was wonky, but we were used to wonky workflows with Teamware anyways. Going with Mercurial was a mistake. Idk what Oracle does now internally, but I bet they use Git. Illumos uses Git.

[emmelaich]

I watched that whole process with fascination. It was long, careful, thorough ... and chose wrong.

A part of me thinks that there was a Sun users aversion to anything Linux related.

[cryptonector]

> A part of me thinks that there was a Sun users aversion to anything Linux related.

It wasn't that. It really was just about file renaming.

[emmelaich]

Git ignored that particular Gordian knot by ignoring it. Many VCSs agonised over file identity. They overestimated the importance and underestimated its difficulty. It's basically impossible in the general sense.

[singron]

Ironically hg now has better rebasing than git e.g. the evolve extension

[cryptonector]

Ah, right, at Sun we used MQ. But anyways, just glancing at the hg evolve docs I'm unconvinced. And anyways, it's an "extension". Mercurial fought rebase for a long time, and they did dumb things like "rebase is non-interactive, and histedit is for when you want to edit the history".

And that is partly why Mercurial lost. They insisted on being opinionated about workflows being merge-based. Git is not opinionated. Git lets you use merge workflows if you like that, and rebase workflows if you like that, and none of this judgment about devs editing local history -- how dare the VCS tell me what to do with my local history?!