Moving to Hg without any analysis at all

[Zachary West]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 23:49, Christopher Forsythe <chris at growl.info> wrote:
>
> Adium did do an analysis like you are suggesting, back in 2009 they switched to mercurial
> http://trac.adium.im/wiki/DistributedVersionControl

Since I'm the one that did the Adium conversion, SVN -> Mercurial was
fantastic. It is infinitely better than SVN.

Is it better than git? I don't know. I do not regret going with
Mercurial over Git, but I am not sure I'd make the same decision to go
with Mercurial at this point.

> s/git/mercurial/
> s/github/google code hosting/
>
> Alternatively:
>
> s/git/mercurial/
> s/github/bitbucket/

To compare Github and Bitbucket in that respect is unfortunately not
so great. Bitbucket has a significantly smaller user base, and Git has
really overtaken Mercurial significantly in the past year or two. From
my perspective, I _never_ see a project use Mercurial, but I _always_
see a project use Git.

Ad populum choices aren't always the right ones, for sure, but it
might be worth the hard look to see whether or not Git's popularity is
a more convincing reason to go with it over Mercurial, all other
things being equal. Github is pretty fantastic, and considering how
difficult submitting patches is to code-bases as large as Adium's or
Pidgin's, it might even be a more preferred way of getting changes
into the proper repository.

That being said, I don't think it makes much of a difference which you
go with. The end goal is fine with both of them: you have a faster,
easier-to-use DVCS that likely will promote more people grabbing it. I
just hope Mercurial doesn't end up being like Monotone in a few years
and this conversation has to start all over again, for all of us.

-- 
Zachary West