[isabelle-dev] Sunsetting Mercurial support in Bitbucket

[Makarius]

On 22/08/2019 21:05, Lars Hupel wrote:
> 
>> Note that I have no inclination to move away from Mercurial to Git, just
>> because the noisy crowds out there are doing it. In the past 1-2 years I
>> have occasionally worked with colleagues on git projects and I am very
>> glad that we don't have this messy pop-culture in our nice and elitist
>> Isabelle environment.
> 
> I'm sorry to interrupt your rant, but ignoring industry (and academia
> too) only gets you so far.
> 
> Mercurial is poorly supported, both from a development and a tooling
> (see above) point of a view.
> 
> It is not very scientific of you to just rule out tools for no other
> reason than "I don't like them".

This is not a rant but sound judgment, while keeping an eye on the
problem very carefully over a long time.

Computing industry is particular subject to the "pop-culture problem". I
have borrowed that expression from Alan Kay, e.g. see his talk about
"Programming and Scaling".

I am not willing to give up my good manners and education concerning
software technology just because some big players in the market have
made market-based decisions.


What counts for "tooling" is Isabelle itself: it is non-standard and
self-hosting in many respects. We have been quite successful with that
approach in the past decades.

I am aware of the user-management problem. There must be proper
solutions without connecting everything to the one big
Google/Microsoft/Apple cloud.


	Makarius