Mercurial 1.0 released [LWN.net]

Mercurial 1.0 released

Posted Mar 27, 2008 12:25 UTC (Thu) by jfj (guest, #37917)
In reply to: Mercurial 1.0 released by rpayne
Parent article: Mercurial 1.0 released

Linus is actually using git to maintain the kernel which is the biggest open source project in
existance, with the fastest development rate and the highest number of developers. Also, linus
has extreme experience in the coordination of tons of patches from thousands of different
people for more than 10 years. Given this situation where a lead developer of the VCS is also
the lead developer of the largest OSS project and this project is the primary testcase of the
VCS tool and the quality of the VCS tool is important for the evolution of linux (which has
some very important "customers"), I trust that git works :)

What people say about "the website is not www.git.org" and "it doesn't have an eclipse plugin"
and "it doesn't compile with Visual C++ 9.0" is pure hype imho. Either you care about project
managment or not.

I think this is a pretty good, in-depth, comparison :)

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Mercurial 1.0 released

Posted Mar 27, 2008 14:33 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Even if it were true that the Linux kernel is the biggest open source project (it isn't), and Linus actually did much Git development these days (he doesn't), it doesn't automatically follow that Git is the best VCS tool for everybody. It may be the case that Git is very good for huge projects, but another system might be better for small or medium-scale ones.

For example, since we're talking about Mercurial here: Mercurial does most of what Git does in a way that is very accessible to casual users, especially converts from CVS or Subversion, and is based on some very nice Python code that is easy to understand and re-use. This should also count for something. Mercurial runs well on Windows, too. And it packs some serious muscle, besides -- anything that can handle the requirements of OpenSolaris and Mozilla can't be that bad in the performance department, either.

Mercurial 1.0 released

Posted Mar 27, 2008 14:35 UTC (Thu) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

> Linus is actually using git to maintain the kernel which is the biggest 
open source project in existance, with the fastest development rate and 
the highest number of developers. Also, linus has extreme experience in 
the coordination of tons of patches from thousands of different people

Which means that speed & merging are the main priorities for Linux kernel 
and therefore for Git.  Other projects have other priorities.


> Given this situation where a lead developer of the VCS is also the lead 
developer of the largest OSS project
[...]
> I think this is a pretty good, in-depth, comparison :)

It's somewhat inaccurate. Linus did the initial Git development, but he 
isn't maintaining it.