Fwd: Switch to git?

[anatoly techtonik]

Hi Guys,

Please, CC as I am not subscribed.

Below you will find my forwarded reply to codereview-discuss mailing list
that we're using for Rietveld development. And it became a heavy letter in
itself. Hopefully, there are constructive points that can be addressed.

I thought that you are interested to know the trend with Git and Mercurial
adoption, and perhaps focus on SWOT analysis, UX side of things or just
visualization of major Mercurial idea vs major Git idea for a simple
developer, who works with open source. Free time is very scarce to learn
something new and not blindly follow a trend. But I believe that there
might be something missing about HG when we start thinking about the
simplicity process of collaborating of changes with others:
share, review, fix, review again, test in combination with different review,
fix, rebase, review, switch to different branch, test, fix, review, push, pull.

It started here with links to stats in 2013:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/codereview-discuss/ilUffSph68I



Also we are considering moving to Github for Spyder IDE, which some of
you may know about. I wish that HG was capable of collaborating with
Github repositories right from the box, but last time I tried it was a
disaster - I not only had to enter somewhat unexplored field of "branch
per feature" concept, but also into the gory details of Git. So I've
abandoned that idea, because there was no time to read something
complicated so that I can hardly explain myself.

After watching what most users do with version control systems, I am
convinced they don't really care about details or really understand what
is happening or (even worse) what they do - they just do the sequence
of commands they're trained to type. Perhaps lack of good visualization,
animated video and lack of time results in people skipping the theory
altogether. Maybe the truth is that Git workflow is just better, or it is not
conservative with regard to good UX out of the box.

Anyway, I am using Mercurial, I like MQ and safe 'hg inc'/'hg out' very
much, I also prefer Python based system which I can patch if
necessary (even though it is GPL that I am not allowed to reuse). I
admit that there are things I don't like, which I can't immediately recall -
perhaps block when I have uncommitted changes, and need to switch to
other branch to test those changes there, but there is MQ - perhaps it
that AND MQ that annoys me most. Anyway, I am getting upset every
time when I am forced to use Git for Python, because users just don't
care. And IPython community of users in particular will make my
current Mercurial based toolchain useless sooner than later, and I'll have
to switch my default mode to Git.
--
anatoly t.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 7:48 AM
Subject: Re: Switch to git?
To: Marc-Antoine Ruel <maruel at chromium.org>
Cc: Bruce Leban <bruce at leapyear.org>, Robert Iannucci
<iannucci at chromium.org>, codereview-discuss
<codereview-discuss at googlegroups.com>


On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 11:01 PM, Marc-Antoine Ruel <maruel at chromium.org> wrote:
> 2013/11/14 Bruce Leban <bruce at leapyear.org>
>>
>> "It's more comfortable" is not a convincing reason to change.
>
> The fact is that the majority of the most active maintainers and
> contributors are not comfortable working with mercurial. Robert's request is
> to double-check the feelings of contributors.
>
> Namely people listed at
> https://code.google.com/p/rietveld/source/list?name=default

Even though I know codebase, I am not active anymore, so I doubt my
voice counts. My process is tuned to Mercurial and I have bad user
experience adapting it to Git. I also sometimes read Rietveld code
with 'hg inc' to see if it still compatible with my patches, without
pulling, and comment on revisions. I will lose this ability. So, I'd
be more in favor if you can somehow leave Mercurial mirror operating.

>> "It solves a problem" is a convincing reason. Is there a problem this
>> solves?
>
> I'm incapable of working with Mercurial. Even after Augie worked with me to
> help fix my workflow. As the defacto maintainer with Andi, I claim it solves
> a problem.

What is the most annoying point for you in HG?
For me it is the constant necessity to edit hgrc in .hg service dir
for every repository by hand. This is to add my username for every new
clone (and default push/pull repositories for every new upload). I am
not working from a single machine as HG developers expect.

>>
>> The repo switched to Mercurial 2 years ago:
>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/codereview-discuss/tQyVTAoQSl8
>>
>> Has anything changed since then?
>
>
> Yes. Guido is not actively working on Rietveld anymore. My reply to Guido in
> the thread you cited hadn't reached the ML at the time. In short, I was for
> git.

If so many people who do HG too are choosing Git, maybe there is
something that I missed? Anybody with good experience with both to
explain?