Comment by sfink

You could also use an alternative CLI for git. My preferred one is hg-git.

I'm sort of kidding, but not really. By using it, I can operate on a git repo using the mercurial CLI, which I am more comfortable with and have built tooling around.

Once you have the extension installed, it's a matter of prepending 'git+' to the beginning of eg a github url to clone it, and then you can use native mercurial commands.

Obviously, this is an extra layer with all of the problems that involves (eg you're going to be managing git branches through an hg interface. Which works surprisingly well most of the time.) So this makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER unless (1) you are comfortable with the hg interface, (2) you aren't that comfortable with the git interface, and (3) you don't need to do complex operations that would require thinking through the layers of what is happening.

Honestly, though, if I want to contribute to a github repo, this gives me everything I need 95% of the time. So far, the only time I ran into trouble was when the active branch was renamed in the github repo. Things got very tangled up, and I had to re-clone and import my patch stack. Judging by the number of people talking about making "backups" of git repos in this comment section, it doesn't sound like that's an unexpected operation in git-land. With mercurial's immutable and append-only nature, I very very rarely need to do this, so it felt kind of awful.

(Admittedly, my main hg repo that I work on is 6GB and I'm normally near the limit of my disk space, so my habits don't really match your typical megabyte-sized github repo in some noncompiled language.)