Moving to Hg without any analysis at all

[Felipe Contreras]

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 10:24 PM, Nader Morshed <morshed.nader at gmail.com> wrote:
>> To be fair, I think mercurial is a fantastic choice compared to
>> monotone (and over SVN), and I doubt it would turn out to be another
>> monotone. However, I feel confident that year after year git would
>> become more and more popular, and mercurial user-base would have to
>> decrease as a result, not because mercurial is bad, but because git is
>> so much better than anything else. A few years from now I think it
>> would be obvious that git would have been a better choice, but how
>> much would this choice hurt is impossible to say, probably not that
>> much.
>
> I said something in the original thread with regards to git on windows
> that I think might be worth clarifying: It is really, really poorly
> maintained. Just last month, I had to delete and re-download the entire
> gtk+ repository because of an issue with pulling updates.

Did you report the issue? How do we know it was not a user problem?

> The msysgit port states on its own front page:
>
>> Please note that there are not enough contributors to the msysGit
>> project to offer commercial-grade support; if you do not have the
>> means to fix your problems (possibly with valuable advice from the
>> msysGit mailing list), or to entice people who can fix them, it is
>> unlikely that your problem gets solved.
>
> http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

Isn't that the same on most projects?

> And additionally they closed down their issue tracker with the message:
>
>> The msysGit issue tracker has been disabled because the process does
>> not work. If you are interested in getting an issue resolved (and you
>> are willing to put in the effort it takes to see to it until it is
>> fixed), please feel free to mail to the msysGit mailing list.
>>
>> Note: if you are not willing to put in an effort to get the problem
>> solved, you should expect other people to be as enthusiastic about
>> fixing it.
>
> http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/wiki/IssueTracker?tm=3

So? The Git project doesn't have a bugzilla at all (they say it's not
needed, and wouldn't work), that doesn't mean anything.

> Keep in mind that Pidgin lists Windows as a supported platform, having
> the code base accessible and functional on Windows is a great help to
> patch writers like myself who use it as their main platform. Brushing
> aside support for effectively means cutting out those contributors and
> making it another roadblock for people wanting to build from source, as
> if there weren't enough for building code on the platform already...

Well, 35% of git users are on Windows according to the last survey[1],
and there isn't a huge cry over bad Windows support as it used to be
some years ago. So, I'd say for the most part it works fine. Anyway,
even if git was chosen, there would be hg clones, and you could use
that if you really wanted to.

Cheers.

[1] https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSurvey2010

-- 
Felipe Contreras