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by ezst 64 days ago
Every success story and happy conversion to jj is evidence that hg should have won the DVCS war, but more importantly, that VCSes and their inherent merits and tradeoffs were always secondary to the social networks underpinning them. GitHub as a defacto monopoly really killed innovation in the VCS space, but also shifted the focus and attention elsewhere. That's why I don't think there'll be so much of a "post-git" without as much as a "post-github".
2 comments
1718627440 64 days ago
Does VCS-agnosticity actually work? It feels like a huge burden to migrate it everytime you want to have the tools from the innovation in your daily work. Also projects want to integrate project versions into each other and reference versions and identifiers are likely VCS specific. That's why I feel VCS monopolies actually has a lot of benefits.
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manithree 64 days ago
LOL. In 2007, I did a side-by-side comparison of SVN, Mercurial and git with my codebase at work (~700k LOC). I know hg got faster eventually, but I still can't believe people say "hg should have won the DVCS war" with a straight face. It was orders of magnitude slower in my tests. Like, 20 minutes to commit large xml files (yeah, I know, but that's where we were). Not just a few ms slower, unbearably slow for several things.

I liked its features better, but chose git, and that was the correct decision.

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ezst 63 days ago
This isn't an apology or a deflection, but different VCSes strike different trade-offs in terms of speed per workload. The mercurial storage model is comparable to video encoding in that it has a somewhat equivalent of "key frames" and alternates differential and full revisions¹. This makes workloads like bisecting or jumping to long-distance commits more efficient, at the expense of the time to create new commits.

For your use-case, mercurial has had a `largefiles`² extension for a very long time (long before git-lfs).

> I liked its features better, but chose git, and that was the correct decision.

Anyhow, my personal story with git is that I bought into the hype and social effects without really challenging my assumptions ("it must be the best, everyone says so"), until I got very fed-up with its obnoxious UI, and someone on IRC told me "ehh, give hg a shot". Nowadays, I mostly interact with git repos through hg-git and jj.

¹: https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2006/ols2006v2-pages-91-98.pd...

²: https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/LargefilesExtension

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