cute post evaluating HG

[TK Soh]

On 4/15/07, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida at ceid.upatras.gr> wrote:
> On 2007-04-15 10:14, TK Soh <teekaysoh at gmail.com> wrote:
> >On 4/15/07, Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy at imag.fr> wrote:
> >>From what I've read, they did a lot of experiments, but the conclusion
> >>boils down to :
> >>
> >> * Windows portability => only bzr and hg match.
> >
> > Although hg (can't speak for bzr) run on Windows, it's still not
> > appearing to the Windozers largely due to the lack of GUI.  These
> > days, we can't expect most [average] developers on win32 to be
> > command-line savvy.
>
> Right on the spot again, as usual, Thomas :)
>
> I don't know enough about the internals of Windows, but I have been
> tempted several times to start with TortoiseSVN as a basis, and make
> something like TortoiseHG.  Integration with the Windows GUI shell,
> similar to that of TortoiseSVN is going to make Mercurial extremely
> appealing to Windows users.

Absolutely!

BTW, though I know little or nothing on TortoiseSVN development, let
me know if I can help in anyway.

> Right now, with the rich feature set of Mercurial, and the beautiful
> opportunities it provides for scaling much better than Perforce for a
> distributed environment (which we are using in the place I work), there
> is really only *one* major obstacle which blocks me from filing an
> official request to switch from Perforce to Hg: the lack of a pretty
> GUI interface for Windows using people.
>
> For a UNIX user, it may sound silly, but having a nice UI which works
> seamlessly with the Windows GUI shell, is *very* important for the
> people who like working with Windows.  A typical example of this are
> the people at my workplace who keep a shared Perforce workspace between
> Windows and Solaris systems, because they like the GUI of Araxis Merge
> a lot more than Emacs ediff-mode.
>
> Having something like TortoiseHG, with configurable GUI options for the
> stuff that usually goes into .hg/hgrc and the global .hgrc would be a
> killer feature for Mercurial on Win32 :)

I can't wait to see this happen :)