Not a holy war - just some salient facts

Mike Meyer mwm at mired.org
Mon Apr 12 16:17:11 CDT 2010


On Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:20:01 +0200
Sune Foldager <cryo at cyanite.org> wrote:
> >> Mercurial and bazaar will work just fine.
> > 
> > Of course they will. Perforce just works better in this case.
> > 
> > Given that you've thrown away mercurials primary advantage by
> > requiring pushes to a central server,
> 
> This is not Mercurial's primary advantage, or that can at least be
> discussed. There are many advantages to Mercurial, central server or
> not; see above.

True, but the performance advantage of the local repo is pretty much
the only one that doesn't boil down to "but we like it that way" - at
least for modern VCS tools. I.e. - mercurial has a slew of extensions
like mq, shelve, tasks, etc. Personally, I'd trade the lot of them for
a good lightweight branch mechanism. Most people seem to hate the
perforce three-phase merge; I personally feel like everything else is
just tossing my code against a wall and hoping the right parts stick
(I've got an outline for a mercurial merge tool that DTRT; one of
these days I hope to finish it).  Perforce has real change tracking;
most people seem to feel that it's either unneeded or a sign of poor
workflow (I tend to agree with the latter, but want the tool to do the
right thing anyway!). The git community seems to think rebase is a
simple operation that everyone should use; the mercurial community
treats it as a special case, and provides tools for handling workflows
that git does with rebase (one of the reasons I'm using hg instead of
git), whereas most CVCS's make you do one or more merges to get that
effect. And so on.

And of course, in this situation - tracking config files in-situ -
it's not clear how much of any of those things makes a difference.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.

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