[oi-dev] Git as a version control system for new OI projects

[Alexey Zaytsev]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 00:05, Julian Wiesener <jw at vtoc.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> as i stated before, i would like to see an proposal than includes some
> details about what problems a toolswitch will solve. I've absolutely no
> preference as i used both tools. However, if we do a switch, we should
> have good reasons for that.

There is no reason besides "more people want git". Everything that can
be done with git can be done with hg. And the two dvcs are such a huge
step from cvs/svn that looking from the 10-years old standpoint, there
is hardly any difference.

But, we are looking from the year 2011.
1) More people know and use git. And it's a fact that hardly needs any
proving. The Linux kernel, Glibc, X.org, Gnome and KDE, are all
maintained in git. Now the two major hg users I see are mozilla and
python. Not puny, but clearly a different weight category. And I
wanted to name OpenOffice, but it looks like the developers abandoned
it to fork LibreOffice, and guess which vcs they chose..

2) Some features are not working as well in hg. Local branches require
jumping hoops. In git, you are usually branching without a second
thought. The 'git remote' equivalents are rather pale. I've heard that
hg is easier to use then git, and maybe this was the case in 2005, but
git usability has gone a long way since then (I've started using git
in 06), and I fail to see how hg is any easier now. It seems
noticeably harder for any non-trivial stuff I'm doing in git. It would
be nice to hear what's so "easy" in hg that's still hard in modern
git.

So a big fat +1 to git.

> Also we should keep in mind, that we still
> want to use our upstreams, and we should have a simple way to keep our
> repos in sync with their repos or merge updates.

Just check how many upstreams are git, and how many are hg. ;)