Comment by wyuenho
7 years ago
They can certainly provide much better porcelain out of the box. Mercurial is at least as powerful as git, but I always joked that the learning curve between the two is something like, you read the docs for 5 mins and you'll know what the next 50 commands to type into hg. Whereas git, you spend 50 minutes reading the Pro Git book, just so you know what the next 5 commands should be.
I am glad hg has both Facebook and Google using it. Otherwise Git would have suck the air out of DVCS.
Sorry, but you don't know git if you think Mercurial is even coming close.
That is not trolling btw. It's really possible not to know what you can do with it if you haven't learned it in depth.
The "Git Book" is what you should read. And you read it once, you read it indepth, and then you're done. After that it's also only 5 minutes of googling, but you can do a lot more. At that point you can even program a simplified git if you want.
> Sorry, but you don't know git if you think Mercurial is even coming close.
And you don't know mercurial if you think that.
Both are great and powerful and both have pros/cons.
> The "Git Book" is what you should read. And you read it once, you read it indepth, and then you're done. After that it's also only 5 minutes of googling, but you can do a lot more.
The problem with git on this is it is actually often sort of hard to find "the right" way to do things. This is in large part because of the popularity of git. There is so much content and a good deal disparate (e.g. Stack Overflow).
Mercurial on the other hand has far less content and it is maybe a little more consolidated and thus IMO slightly easier to find.
> At that point you can even program a simplified git if you want.
.... are you sure you are not trolling...
TBH, I've been an hg and git user for about 10 years now, I have only come across simple things that you'd expect to work in git but doesn't. For the longest time, you have to resort to contortions like this[1] so as to not lose commits after reverting a merge and then merge again.
[1]: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/howto/r...
What can't you do in Mercurial that you can in git these days?
BTW, I think we are talking about the same book.
I could name a few things, like interactive rebases, but the main thing is not something that can really be explained. Have you ever significantly become strong in some kind of contest, may it be sports, gaming, music or similar? There is this situation where one day you struggle with something and don't see an end, and the next day it finally clicks, and you can do things naturally that one day earlier where not even imaginable.
If you've experienced that once consciously, then you can regonize it and you know when you experience it you've hit someting really good in your life that moves you forward.
Sadly it seems you must take that hurdle in anything until a certain age or you will always believe this is impossible and therefore never invest the energy to reach it.
The thing is that this is not possible to achieve with any random software. For instance no matter how much you learn MS Word, you probably won't experience that. But when learning Vim or Emacs there's a chance you get there. Same is with git. And once you've achieved it once consciously, you will always want to be in that state in everything important you do.
That's why the really good stuff only has a few followers, most simply don't get the appeal because they never would invest the energy to get "there" even if they knew exactly how much it would take. But for those who have achieved it there is no going back. You cannot go back from controlling (almost) any bit of your repository to Mercurial.
But that's also why I think for most users something like Mercurial should be The VCS. Most people don't know the reward they are missing, so they don't feel the pain of missing it, and therefore have no logical reason to go through the pain of really learning git.
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