[isabelle-dev] Sunsetting Mercurial support in Bitbucket

[Lawrence Paulson]

Thanks. 

There will be many more accidents from me if Atlassian remove Mercurial support from Sourcetree, as seems likely. (They are the parent company.)

Larry 

On 23 Aug 2019, at 08:09, Lars Hupel <hupel at in.tum.de> wrote:

>> What are the objective reasons for us to stick with Mercurial? What
>> are its real benefits over Git?
> 
> I obviously can't speak about Makarius' personal taste, but as far as I have observed, the criticism of Git wrt Mercurial usually falls into two classes:
> 
> 1) more complex UI; i.e. it is easier to produce "Git accidents" than "Mercurial accidents"
> 2) the cultural emphasis on rewriting history as opposed to Mercurial's approach of monotonic changes
> 
> Both of them have been (and continue to) losing their truth over the years:
> 
> 1) From observing Mercurial and Git users alike, I don't see a large difference of "accidents per action" (this is completely subjective of course). As a power user, the criticism gets inverted: it is much easier to recover from Git accidents than from Mercurial accidents.
> 2) Git users have largely been moving away from this, at least concerning mainline development, to the extent that most productive Git repositories reject non-monotonic changes. Ironically, none of our Mercurial repositories in the Isabelle ecosystem do that. Also, the Mercurial developers have in the past produced several extensions that try to provide a way to evolve private changesets.
> 
> There are various other technical points about learning curve, performance etc., but the fact remains that for most use cases, Git and Mercurial are extensionally equivalent.
> 
> Cheers
> Lars