[isabelle-dev] Sunsetting Mercurial support in Bitbucket

Lawrence Paulson lp15 at cam.ac.uk
Fri Aug 23 14:45:42 CEST 2019


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



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