Promoting the use of Mercurial; was: Re: gnome dvcs survey results

[Benoit Boissinot]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 03:29:13PM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 01:23:06PM -0600, Matt Mackall wrote:
> 
> > This of course begs the question: why does git still suck? If they have
> > six times the people power, you'd think that over the last 3 years they
> > would have pulled so far ahead in quality that hg and bzr wouldn't even
> > be on people's radars. But git's kluge-ness is deeply embedded in its
> > DNA and evolving away from that is apparently going to take geological
> > time. 
> 
> Well, two years ago, git and hg were roughly tied, at least in terms
> of the number of projects who use it, and from my perception of what
> DSCM various OSS developers might choose to use.  The Gnome DCVS
> survey came as a shock to me (and apparently others) since it has
> shown that in terms of mindshare, git has made some fairly impressive
> strides, at least in one particular community.

I don't find it suprising, Xorg/freedesktop began switching to git 3
years ago. That was the best marketing they could have in the desktop
apps environment: given the number of things shared first between
the kernel and Xorg, Xorg and freedesktop, and finally freedesktop and
the gnome stack, the "contamination" was the logical result.

A way to "counteract" it would have been to aggressively push another
DVCS two years ago (when gnome switched to svn).

That's the same thing with ruby, git started being used by ruby on rail
and it then propagated through the ruby community.

The obvious conclusion is, if you want your tool to be widely adopted,
fight for its adoption in a community that shares a lot with other
distinct communities, ie. not Xen or Sun ;)

regards,

Benoit
-- 
:wq