From: John Wells <lists@...>
Date: 2008-03-25T21:27:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Why git instead of mercurial?

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 7:36 AM, Jason Roelofs <jameskilton@gmail.com> wrote:
> I find it funny that your only point of comparison between git and
>  Mercurial is the technology with which said tool is implemented. Last
>  time I checked, the *only* time developers care about how something is
>  implemented is if it's Windows only (.NET, MFC). If the tool works,
>  people will use it.
>
>  How about an actual comparison of git and Mercurial functionality wise?

Well, I guess that was my point. From what I understand, git and
mercurial are essentially feature-identical. In fact, the developer of
mercurial spent some time working on git, wanted to change something
that Linus disagreed with, and decided to go off and rewrite git.

There are many, many articles out there comparing the two (google git
versus hg), and while there may subtle differences, the similarities
far outweigh these. In fact, one gent took a chapter out of the
mercurial book, replaced all references to the equivalent git
commands, and said everything else stood on its own.

git is used by the Linux kernel devs and others...mercurial is used on
the bigger Sun projects now (OpenJDK, OpenSolaris), by the Mozilla
foundation, by XenSource, and more.

So, after doing all this reading, it seemed to me that the only thing
left was to look at the underlying technology. And God help me, I'd
rather program in Python and C than Perl and C any day. I assume this
is true for a lot of Ruby developers...while Ruby has its roots in
Perl, it's kinda like being a clean cut metrosexual with embarrassing
redneck parents you still humor and honor, but try not to bring to
social gatherings...

To me, mercurial seems a more natural fit for Ruby software projects.

Thanks,
John