Repository format comparison

[Giuseppe Bilotta]

Hello, on another mailing list I just found a link to this blog
article

http://keithp.com/blog/Repository_Formats_Matter.html

(from a month ago) which also has a brief mentioning of Mercurial:

"""
Mercurial uses a truncated forward delta scheme where file revisions
are appended to the repository file, as a string of deltas with
occasional complete copies of the file (to provide a time bound on
operations). This suffers from two possible problems—the first is
fairly obvious where corrupted writes of new revisions can affect old
revisions of the file. The second is more subtle -- system failure
during commit will leave the file contents half written. Mercurial has
recovery techniques to detect this, but they involve truncating
existing files, a piece of the Linux kernel which has constantly
suffered from race conditions and other adventures.

I was looking seriously at Mercurial for X.org development, and was
fortunate to spend a week last January with key developers from both
Mercurial and Git. Discussions with both groups led me to understand
that Git provided more of what X.org needed in terms of repository
flexibility and stability than Mercurial did. The key detractors for
Git was (and remains) the steep learning curve for the native Git
interface; ameliorated for some users by alternate interfaces (such as
Cogito), but not for core developers.
"""

-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta

"E la storia dell'umanità, babbo?"
"Ma niente: prima si fanno delle cazzate,
 poi si studia che cazzate si sono fatte"
(Altan)
("And what about the history of the human race, dad?"
 "Oh, nothing special: first they make some foolish things,
  then you study what foolish things have been made")