Head On

I have used Mercurial for over a year, and started using Git on Agila Sverige. I really like Git and I have therefore kept a draft blog post trying to capture why I like better than Mercurial.

That draft was just deleted since I essentially share Dustin Sallings thoughts on the differences between Mercurial and Git. Apart from the Gnu Arch and Darcs parts - what he said.

A year ago I was frustrated over Rails’ close ties to Subversion. But as Rails is moving from SVN to Git, the future is looking bright. The only bastion left I can think of is RubyForge.

I’ve been using distributed version control for over a year now, and if it is up to me, I will never use a centralized VCS again.

When I evaluated the alternatives last year, I choose Mercurial as the DVCS we are using at WeMind. The reasons were:

1. Usability - git was quite obscure back then
2. Speed - bazaar and monotone was quite slow
3. Large enough uptake - OpenSolaris and Mozilla started using Mercurial at the same time.
4. Runs on all platforms, if we ever employed someone who wants to use Windows
5. Built in Python which could be a good think if I ever wanted to extend it

A year later we are happy with Mercurial, but the landscape has changed. In particular I am seeing a huge growth of people using git, especially within the Ruby community. Which in itself is something I am happy about.

The biggest reason I see for git’s resurgence is git-svn. It allows people to start using git locally while still having Subversion as the backend, and when everyones ready the switch is easy.

There is a hgsvn in the Mercurial world, but it is read only, so you cannot push your changes back to Subversion. I strongly believe that the Mercurial community should focus on this if it wants to regain its momentum.

Git still has weak support for Windows, but that seems to be a non-issue in the Ruby world.

I am pretty agnostic about which DVCS will be the dominant one. The most important thing is that people are moving away from the centralized VCS’s.

For a great post on the subject, read what Dave Dribin has to say about it

I am starting a new development project where I will do a lot of coding myself, at least initially. There will most probably be times when I have to work offline - perhaps a litte evening coding while at vacation with my family, definitely the days when I am home because the kids cannot be at kindergarten.

So I had this initial thought - can I make a offline copy of the Subversion repository, make changes to it and merge it back when I come online again?

It turns out that there are solutions for doing that - namely SVK and svn-mirror. However, while searching I around I also realized that there had been a revolution in the VCS world, and no one told me.

In the wake of the BitKeeper mishap, it appears that several groups of people found it their mission to create the next great distributed versioning system. These days we have:

• Baazar-ng
• Darcs
• Git
• Mercurial
• Monotone

These seem to the more prominent ones, but I am sure you can dig up a few that I have missed.

To make a long story short, I have decided to use Mercurial for my next development effort. In fact I am using Mercurial for versioning all my files. It is ridiculously simple to set up versioning for an existing folder (hg init; hg add) so there is simply no reason not to.

To learn more, I recommend reading this, this and this.