Subject: Re: [VOTE] git versus mercurial (for DragonflyBSD)

From: Arne Babenhauserheide <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:16:02 +0100

Am Montag 27 Oktober 2008 05:15:11 schrieb Leo Razoumov:
> >  I created a head-to-head code_swarm of Mercurial and Git and it clearly
> > shows that Mercurial development didn't slow down.
>
> I am not familiar with code swarms, sorry. My impressions are
> subjective are thoroughly un-scientific:-)

That's always the case with code_swarms. 

They only show the commit activity: How often how many files where changed. 

They aren't a fair comparision but a damn unfair battle relying strongly on 
development style, programming language (influences the style) and such. 

What you can see very clearly in them is how activity patterns _change_. 

And the Mercurial activity doesn't slow down. 

Instead in the beginning you can see them pacing each other, git always the 
bigger activity. 
There was a moment in may this year when git activity had receded to the point 
where it was equal to Mercurials activity, but it recovered from that. 

An artifact in Mercurial is that it took an almost two week break in July this 
year, but apart from that development always rolled on, and in august the 
commits where coming fast again. 

The smaller activity can for example be a result of a development style where 
changes are thouroughly discussed before they get implemented. 

> (1) Judging by the activity of mailing lists git community is several
> times larger and more active in terms of actual submitted patches.

This is something which didn't change. Git had higher activity from the start, 
yet Mercurials actual code paced it well and was faster at some things. 

Git still has higher activity, but that can simply stem from Mercurial being 
almost completely done in Python which need less code to do the same work. 

> (2) Hg forest extension is still not in the tree with outdated and
> incorrect documentation in the wiki. For me it was biggest reason to
> migrate from Hg to git.

Why didn't you instead update the documentation in the wiki? 

I don't use the forest extension, so I can't judge whether it is fit for 
inclusion in the tree. 

But I wrote the group extension and learned that way that writing Mercurial 
extensions is far easier than I thought. And different from the shell, Python 
code is platform independent. 

Best wishes, 
Arne

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