to git or not to git

David Boddie david at boddie.org.uk
Fri Aug 31 12:00:37 UTC 2018


On Fri Aug 31 11:03:22 UTC 2018, Alessandro Rubini wrote:

> > * Use hg or other trackers if you can.
> 
> why? It's already oh so difficult to get people make decent commits to
> git, where at least I can point to all the world doing that...

Bernhard gave some good reasons but I can think of another:

 * To follow the cultural norms of the communities you are part of.

My impression is that a number of projects started to use Mercurial because
git was initially linked very closely to development of the Linux kernel.
So, projects associated with other operating systems may have adopted
Mercurial as a strategic move. Also, Mercurial was seen as having better
cross-platform support in the beginning.

I'm thinking of Symbian and the OpenSolaris derivatives. Inferno also went
via Google Code (svn) to Bitbucket (hg).

Using Mercurial instead of git is also a bit like using another kernel
instead of Linux. It seems unnecessary to use something else when you already
have something that works, but it's useful to have working options in case
you find yourself using a device without a Linux port but with FreeBSD
support, for example.

David



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