<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/></head><body>I saw recently that there has been a good deal of conversation on
this mailing list about Git. Personally, I think that Mercurial (Hg)
is much better than Git, and I wanted to mention a few things
regarding this:<br>
<ol><li>Although (as someone recently mentioned) Mozilla Firefox OS
switched from using Hg to Git, Mozilla still has a quite active (4
repositories changed so far today) Hg source code repository at <http://hg.mozilla.org>.</li><br><li>When I was considering whether to use Git or Hg for my own
single-person project, I was overwhelmed by the complexity of Git, with
139
commands in version 1.5.0.. A quick look at screenshots of
TortoiseGit's context menu versus TortoiseHg's will show this
difference as well. While Git may be faster than Hg for certain
operations on Linux, it has a reputation for being difficult to
learn, and its Windows support (as of 2010) was
reported to be much worse than Hg's. (Some of this information
is from a book that comes with TortoiseHg, <i>Mercurial: The</i><i> </i><i>Definitive Guide</i>, which might appear to be biased,
but its comparison of different VCSs seems objective to me.)
This book also mentions that Git repositories require frequent
"repacks" of metadata, which can decrease performance, take
large amounts of disk space and server bandwidth, and take many
hours to complete for large repositories. It goes on to say that
Git uses shell or Perl scripts to implement several of its
commands, which can ignore certain errors that should be fatal.<br>
</li></ol>
<p>I have been using Mercurial (through TortoiseHg) for 6 months now
and am very pleased with it. (I used TortoiseSVN before that, and
had some frustrations with it.) Recently I found that a file in my
repository had somehow gotten corrupted, but after reading the
page on Mercurial's website about repository corruption, I was
able to successfully recover my repository.<br>
</p>
<p>Since switching to a different VCS can be quite an ordeal, I
wanted to mention these things. I admit that I am not very
knowledgeable about VCSs, so please correct me if I am wrong about
anything.<br>
</p>
<p>-- Timothy</p>
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