BlackBox comments

"Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar?" by Ted Naleid

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:42:28 -0700

I gave a presentation at my workplace last month on this topic. We do groovy/grails development, and most of the developers are comfortable with SVN, but don't have any prior experience with any sort of DVCS system.

Of the three, I prefer Mercurial over Git or Bazaar, though I think any one of the 3 is preferable to SVN. I think that for developers coming from subversion (who often don't fully understand the full set of commands available there) that it has the best balance of speed, ease of learning, and power of the 3 systems.

"Is Maven going away?" by Ravi

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:18:56 -0700

Our entire company is on the verge of being completely Maven. Team development using Maven in our IDEs makes development so much easier than anything else. The infrastructure provided behind every tag in the POM provides so much to our environment. The fact that things aren't willy-nilly added to the manifest and is performed by Maven plugins makes things structured really well. Our stack is CVS+Archiva+Hudson+(Mevenide2/EclipseMaven) and works great once you understand it.

"Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar?" by Bastian

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:07:34 -0700

Hi,

I wonder, what functionality you're missing from the Mercurial plug-in. Could you give us a hint, so we can improve in this area?

In my opinion the plug-in now supports most features of Mercurial. If you haven't tried a version above 0.2.576, you've missed all the good stuff :-), as there have been quite a lot of fixes and additions to functionality since March 08.

Best regards, Bastian

"Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar?" by William Tanksley Jr

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:14:53 -0700

"Git has one definitive advantage over Mercurial: Branches."

Well... Not really. That is, Git handles branches as part of a single repository, but that's far from a definitive advantage with a dvcs; I can have as many branches as I want, merge them in when I want, and generally not worry about managing them. Git wins here, but only a "feature check", not a "definitive advantage".

Git's bidirectional SVN support _is_ a definitive advantage. It's the right feature at the right time.

Mercurial's cross-platform speed, support, and ease of use (combined) give it a definitive advantage. I have _no_ choice but to use it at work.

Mercurial's atomic checkins are, I would say, a definitive advantage. Git, like CVS and SVN, thinks that part of the job of a VCS is to write ">>>>>>>" merge markers into my code and/or documentation. I think that makes a hard job (merging) even more annoying. Because of this my policy is to never run 'svn update' until after I've confirmed each incoming change. Mercurial makes that a total non-issue -- it's not even possible to screw up a merge (or a push) in this manner, because conflicts are handled by the version control system, NOT by the flat files contained in the version control system.

My summary: I'm very happy with Mercurial, but I'm eagerly waiting either for Git to mature enough to be useful on Windows, or for Mercurial to get mature bidirectional SVN support.

"Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar?" by masukomi

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 07:53:25 -0700

Git is trivial to build on OS X and works without issue. The only thing that doesn't build easily is the help docs (they're asciidocs, which i think os x is missing pieces for). So, on os x none of the "git help foo" commands work (unless you've gone through a lot of hoops) , but it's not a big deal because they're all available online.

And on os x you can use GitNub, which looks like a cool graphical browsing tool.

"Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar?" by Tom Willis

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:37:13 -0700

i needed something that would work on both windows and linux so I went with mercurial. And it's been pretty smooth thus far. Setting up the web cgi for a central repo was pretty easy too.

out of the all the distributed scms's they all seem to be moving towards and identical set of features and cmd line syntax, so I think all 3 you list are a good option and dare I say somewhat compatible with each other.

"Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar?" by Nazar

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:46:15 -0700

Hi there.

I changed over from Subversion to Git about six months. The key to choosing Git over Hg or Bazaar was the uni-direction SVN support that is available in Git. Unfortunately Hg or Bz only support importing from an SVN whilst Git supports pulling and pushing.

I've ended up using Git as a branch management tool for SVN.

Downside is that Netbeans does not support Git yet although someone has started work on nbGit, by basing it on the Hg Netbeans plugin. nbGit is hoted on GitHub.

Best of luck with your migration.

"Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar?" by doubleface

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:55:33 -0700

Mercurial has its own patch queue manager : Mercurial Queue

"Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar?" by Steven Osborn

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:10:31 -0700

I've been using Mercurial for a while now and it was a very smooth transition from SVN. The UI is very familiar and the commands map well. Mercurial is being used by some pretty large projects out there like OpenSolaris, NetBeans, Mozilla, MoinMoin and naturally seems to be pretty popular among the Python crowd.

"Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar?" by Andreas

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:20:16 -0700

A few words on git Portability

There are some prebuilt packages for Mac OSX available on the net. If you want to build it from source I'd suggest MacPorts which takes care of the dependencies.

Support for Windows is available by the mSysGit fork which is currently being merged back into the official version. Yet another possibility would be to use Cygwin.

Usability

It's true that Git installs a whole bunch of commands which can freak out most novices by the sheer enormity of their number.

However, in day-to-day work you will only use a few of them. These commands are called the porcellain while the other commands are called the plumbing. They can be quite handy for special cases when you want to do something unusual with your repository.

I strongly suggest that you read the docs before working with git as it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot when just playing around with those commands. Additionally, GitCast has really nice introductory screencasts for different aspects of Git.

Advantages

Git has one definitive advantage over Mercurial: Branches. I know that the Mercurial guys just went on to define a repository to be a branch but having X directories/repositories for different versions of the same source is just wrong in my humble opinion.

P.S.: Your Markdown plugin doesn't seem to get the headers right in the preview.