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

[Theodore Tso]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 05:01:18PM -0600, Matt Mackall wrote:
> 
> I don't think this is really true. The various debug commands expose
> just about everything that exists. And there seems to be very little
> demand for such functionality.

I stand corrected; are these debug commands documented anywhere?

> > As far as "why git does still suck", there's a loaded question if I
> > ever saw one.  :-)
> 
> Yes. Sometimes I envy Linus' ability to make provocative statements. 

Yeah well, note that Linus tends to back up his provocative statements
with well reasoned arguments for why he believes (for example) Hg's
methods of dealing with tags are insane.  You might disagree with
them, and you might think that he's insufferably rude, but at least
you know where he stands and why he holds a particular technical
opinion.  I confess I was wondering whether you were thinking of git's
lack of support of handling renames, or imperfections in Windows
support, or the fact that its UI is probably more complicated (but
more flexible) Hg's.  There are plenty of justifications that you
could have cited for why git sucked, but I was curious which one was
foremost in your mind as being important enough that it would rise to
the level of suckitude.  

(For example, I believe Hg's tag system is misdesigned, but at the
same time I don't think it rises to the level of "Hg sucks"; that is,
the design problems in .hgtags wouldn't cause me not to use Hg just
because of those design issues.  Some git partisans might make that
claim, but I'd call them silly, while still agreeing that .hgtags
definitely has its problems.)

> So here's another one:
> 
> A few years ago the core Mercurial and Bzr developers met in London for
> a weekend to compare notes and came to a tentative agreement that
> merging the two projects would be a good idea. This idea was very
> quickly torpedoed by Mark Shuttleworth's insistence that whatever
> project resulted would have to have copyright held by Canonical. The
> stated reason was allowing proprietary feature extensions as part of
> their Launchpad strategy.
> 
> I wrote Mercurial to be Free with a capital 'F' as a reaction to the
> object lesson of Bitkeeper. So entrusting my work to an organization
> that had plans to embrace and extend it was just not going to happen.
> Canonical continues to this day to raise doubts that they actually 'get'
> Free Software (*cough* Launchpad *cough* upstreaming *cough*
> closed-source kernel drivers *cough*) was just not going to happen.
> Given the GNOME project's genesis in the dispute over the status of QT,
> if I were the GNOME project, I'd be wary of adopting a tool like Bzr
> without strong reassurances of its continued and full openness.

No argument here that sometimes Canonical doesn't 'get' Free Software,
and that not merging Bzr and Hg was singularly unfortunate.  Although
the argument I would use is not Bzr's openness (bzr's license is
GPLv2, and the possibility of relicesing it is just as hard as any
other OSS project) --- but rather whether bzr's development community
would be viable if Mark were to ever pull the plug on funding its
development team.

						- Ted