I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla(glandium.org) |
I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla(glandium.org) |
I think the short version is: they made `git-cinnabar`, which is a git-to-hg translator, to help git users interact with the Mozilla repos.
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One contribution I can make:
> For reasons I don't know, Mozilla decided to use separate Mercurial repositories as "branches".
Originally, separate clones was the recommended way to do "topic branches" in Mercurial (not to be confused with "named branches"). There was no direct equivalent to git's branches. Eventually, Mercurial got 'bookmarks' which basically closes that gap, but that only became a core feature in 2011, well after these Mozilla repos were established.
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Aside: I prefer Mercurial myself, and I hope to keep using it for personal projects until I die (:
One of my favorite stories happened three or four jobs ago... at this job I kept a giant whiteboard that I had swiped from a conf room, behind my cubicle. And whenever anybody asked questions we put it up on the board. We were an SVN shop and someone had asked how Git worked and I was like "do you want me to explain Git, which is harder to understand, or Mercurial, which is basically the same but a little easier if you're coming from SVN?" and they said Mercurial. So that is how for a week or two a set of sketched diagrams sat around behind me describing Mercurial.
So while that was happening, I was in the middle of some big commit, this guy Cal comes over. Cal is, we'd classify him as nontechnical but he's essentially the Product Owner for the stuff I'm building, he's the one whose workflows the software needs to enable. And I motion to him that I need 5 minutes and finish my thought and save and commit and whatever else, take off my headphones and ask "what's up, Cal?"
He has been staring at the diagram for those minutes, bored, and this non-technical user says, "okay, so let me see if I got this straight, inside some folder there's another folder named dot-h-g that is a repo..." and goes on to explain everything about Mercurial from a simple diagram, except that he can't figure out what problem it solves. And so I tell him, "you know how on fileserv everybody has to back up every file by appending a timestamp? software developers use these commits instead, so that every commit tells you who changed it and they have to say why they changed it, and that's how you save it," and his eyes kind of go wide and he's like "why don't we have this?!" and I'm like "you could! let me show you TortoiseHg..." and he really liked it, and of course then couldn't convince anybody to actually use it. (There's a problem where you really need to lock, say, an XLSX file.)
Mercurial is always to my mind the version control system that a typical nontechnical office worker could appreciate just from looking at a whiteboard diagram.
Same here. I use TortoiseHg daily and propose the occasional contribution when something breaks/can be improved. It is really a project that has been chugging away for more than 15 years now.
TortoiseGit works, Fork is pretty good but it's a shame that GitKraken is so expensive.
> my goodness did they beat around the bush w/regard to their actual contribution to this process (per the title).
Fair point. I came up with the title first. Then as the content grew large and diluted the essence of the title, I reconsidered, but ended up sticking to it as a shameless clickbait.
> Originally, separate clones was the recommended way to do "topic branches" in Mercurial (not to be confused with "named branches").
That still leaves the question "why topic branches rather than named branches?". For the needs of the rapid release process, named branches could have been used, but weren't. I haven't tried to contact the people involved at the time to have a definite answer. It's not /that/ important, and I'm not /that/ curious.
I originally wanted to go to sleep but the writing was too captivating to put down, and every paragraph was motivated, and it wasn’t stretched. It was the length it needed to be.
IIRC, topic branches were used because:
- Mercurial named branches were half baked at the time and I was advised against them by folks who knew hg better than me.
- We were already using separate clones for security update versions (3.5.x and 3.6.x) so we just kept doing the same. Some tooling could be reused.
- Rapid release was a big change and we didn't want to disrupt mozilla-central dev. Having rapid release in different clones got us out of the way and reduced the risk of negatively affecting development. m-c was the domain of developers, the rr repos were the domain of the release team.
Some of it is captured by preed in https://soberbuildengineer.com/blog/2006/11/version-control-... and announcing hg in https://soberbuildengineer.com/blog/2007/04/version-control-...
JST post on bzr vs hg perf, https://web.archive.org/web/20070219012211/http://weblogs.mo...
I enjoyed it. It could maybe have been two posts, but it's a headline, it's supposed to get you to click on it.
And it's true, too.
Coming from Git, with the git rebase --interactive flow coupled with the reflog to provide a backup to let you undo any mistakes, MQ was awful. Your choices were (1) allow hg qrefresh to overwrite the old contents of your patches and hope you never made mistakes, or (2) make your patchqueue an hg repo and have to look at second-order diffs. (I chose option (3)--symlink my patchqueue into Dropbox so that I could use Dropbox's history feature as a kind of poor man's reflog.) And to top it all off, MQ didn't understand three-way merge logic the way git rebase does. This workflow seems to me clearly worse than Git's tools, and I'll never understand why so many developers at Mozilla claimed to prefer MQ over Git.
The generally accepted narrative these days is that git became popular because of github (with the implicit assumption that was an arbitrary choice) and/or the Linux kernel (without much questioning of why people specifically cared about Linux's tooling for wource control).
But what I remember from ~2010 was a load of blog posts eulogizing history rewriting and how it allowed you to separate out the activities of committing changes locally in order to record the state of your work at various times, and assembling the final patch into something suitable for review by others.
Meanwhile mercurial took the stance that history rewriting is bad, and as a result people ended up using even worse solutions like `mq`, which is basically tooling around directories full of numbered patch files.
You still see that distinction in hg: once it eventually did realise that history editing is a desirable feature for many reasonable workflows it added a lot of additional complexity to the basic model, with features like phases (supposed to stop you rewriting commits that someone else might be depending on, but just using the proxy measure of "was this pushed to a 'publishing' repo") and "evolve" (which keeps a complete history of history rewrites; useful in principle for tools like code review systems to avoid the common pattern of putting a "patch id" into the commit message, but in practice felt like a lot of extra mental overhead).
So at least my view is that git made a "practicality beats purity" bet on history rewriting being a net good, and hg made the opposite bet, and eventually lost.
And back on the original topic, I used hg personally before I used git, and then professionally at Mozilla before git cinnabar came along (although by this point I was using git in other projects). So I've used mercurial a lot but actively prefer git when given a choice. Nevertheless I think this article understates just how good cinnabar is compared to the options that preceded it; apart from the case where you have a hg hash from an external system and want to find the commit locally (where you just run `git cinnabar hg2git`) it's basically totally seamless and just works without problems. It's a small tool that does one thing really well, to the extent that it's easy to overlook just how good it really is.
Wasn't there an option (4): using 'qsave' and 'qpush --merge' to merge two MQ series with 3-way merge support? I don't think I've every really used it, though.
But overall, yeah Mercurial was playing catch-up to Git on that front for a while. Surely didn't help adoption.
This is still what the Guide on the Mercurial site mentions as the "basic workflow" for working on separate features. Named branches are considered "advanced", and bookmarks are an afterthought entirely.
About 10 years ago, after reading a lot about how hg was more intuitive than git, I decided to give it a try. I was already using git branches a lot, so this was definitely not a good first impression.
I imagine you're referring to the "hg book"[1] ?
It irks me that that site hasn't been updated since ~2009, and there doesn't seem to be anything equivalent for "modern" Mercurial. Alas.
EDIT: oh, looks like there is a somewhat newer version (~2015?): https://book.mercurial-scm.org/read/part-getting-started.htm...
Same here. It is one of the minor tragedies that git won the popularity contest when mercurial is so much more pleasant.
I also would expect that Github eventually will also offer mercurial repos.
p.s. And let's not talk about abomination that is GitLFS (starting from the fact that it requires separate subcommand).
[2] https://engineering.fb.com/2014/01/07/core-infra/scaling-mer...
I used Mercurial in the past for a bit, and it was fine. But for me it doesn't seem to have any huge advantages over git, if any. And after so many years of experience using git, I know what workflows work well, how to resolve merge conflicts, how to revert to an old commit if something really gets messed up, etcetera.
I don't see any other DVCS really being able to replace git in the short run and I wouldn't be surprised if git will stay number 1 for the following decennia, as in my opinion it's really great software. A DVCS really has to provide substantial benefits over git in order to replace git as the number 1 DVCS.
> I hate the GitHub review UI with a passion. At least, right now, GitHub PRs are not a viable option for Mozilla [...] the more general shortcomings in the review UI.
Apart from that it was the best developer experience I've had with a VCS.
Of course, I shouldn't really expect such from Mozilla given all the other dubious actions they've taken over time.
You'll never get consensus on X being better than Y in the tech world. There are always going to be people that insist Y is better than X. And more power to them. But you have to be realistic. There is a lot of stuff that just never gets a lot of traction. Mercurial is one of those things. It's like betamax vs. vhs.
Initially it looked promising and then Github happened and the rest is history. The whole industry now runs on Git and Mercurial sort of flat lined in terms of growth after Github started hosting essentially the entirety of the OSS world (with few but notable exceptions of course). At this point it's a hard sell for new projects and some of the larger remaining users are switching away or are considering it.
By the time github came about, git already had a lot more mindshare than hg. While hg wasn't yet clearly an also ran, it was clearly the less popular solution, and many open source tools started supporting git but either not supporting hg, or if they did it was an afterthought and often the maintainers broke something hg without noticing and then releasing with broken hg support.
just to be clear, i have worked with both hg and git, and can get along with either, but i do prefer hg.
have also written several foss tools - for example csvfix.
But I was only a bystander (and early adopter), so maybe something went on "behind the scenes" that warrants this attribution? Or maybe it is a just a bit careless and was meant to be more like "... he was one of the creators", which one probably could justify.
Coincidentally, I just checked the Wikipedia page for Subversion and was surprised that there is basically nothing on the history of Subversion and who created it, which I find sad.
=> https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/about/manifesto/
In future it won't be possible to contribute to Firefox without a Microsoft account. If Microsoft decide to close your account (which they're entitled to do — they own the website), you can't participate.
Mozilla were one of the few hold-outs against this particular attempted monopoly. Again, Mozilla makes a short-termist decision that makes sense for a Silicon Valley lifestyle brand, but makes no sense for an independent mission-driven public-service community project.
They're an untrustworthy upstream.
All I needed to come to this conclusion was the abandonment of interesting (and necessary) projects like Servo, and the continual increase of superiors' salaries.
What makes you think that?
1. linus didn't use version control at all, he just got patches emailed to him, then every now and then he'd publish a tarball and incremental patches (e.g. a 2.4.11-rc2 patch on top of 2.4.11-rc1) - the world had no visibility into his tree's development aside from the tarballs and inter-version patches he sent out
2. and because of that, no one else used version control for submitting changes, they just sent patches to lkml
3. there was some use of CVS for some ports / subsystems, but again, it was used to generate patches to email to linus
4. people built lots of tools around this work flow, like `patchwork` and horrible shell scripts
I came in contact with version control systems in the following order CVS (also a bit of a weird episode using RCS), Subversion, git, then mercurial
I have loved git and still do. But nowadays I use mercurial for my pet projects.
There is no denying that git "won", mercurial would have been a worthy alternative.
I think the ultimate answer is maintaining an asset stack containing files that allow for inherit diff chunks or however that might be described.
(hi glandium, sylvestre)
I just don't think there is good RoI for implementing Mercurial support. It really isn't about the interface (which I think most people agree hg is better than git). It's just the network effect: most projects use git so everybody learns git and they don't want to learn another tool even if it's better in some ways. At the end of the day, once you pay a higher upfront cost to learn the ~5 git invocations you need, your daily productivity between using git and hg is probably the same.
Google and Facebook is different: they have a unique use-case and scale, and massive internal tooling teams supporting their use-cases. Also, as an employee, you're probably more open to different VCS systems because if you learn hg at Facebook, you're learning it on company time whereas if you learn for an open source project, you're learning it on your time.
It's almost like qwerty vs dvorak in that regard, except git and mercurial were contemporaries. Mercurial isn't quite good enough to displace git, and git has Linus as a promoter which was all it needed to be the leader.
That said, I agree that the network effect of having just one is more valuable than mercurial's ergonomics (which could still use a good branch story).
No, it isn't. Git is unopinionated and doesn't try to shove some half-baked idea of "best practices" and "you're doing it wrong" down your throat.
This means there is no friction in adopting Git at the workplace.
Mercurial is over.
[1] At least some of that may be due to file descriptor leaks: https://github.com/facebook/sapling/issues/464
Microsoft hired a git maintainer to improve large repo performance and so it's better than it was.
I believe Meta’s implementation includes server components (Mononoke) that were not open-sourced, or at least not buildable without closed-source dependencies. Same with Microsoft’s fork of git that relies on a virtual filesystem, but that one is open-sourced, if for Windows, not Linux.
One other interesting thing I've noticed, mercurial has stopped building windows standalone releases. It's been that way for around 9 months.
I mean to be fair so is Firefox
How come? That seems highly unlikely to me, especially when you consider that one of their larger competitors (Bitbucket) had Mercurial support for a long time and then removed it.
From when they dropped Mercurial in 2020 [1]:
"Yesterday marked an end of an era for Mercurial users, as Bitbucket announced to no longer support Mercurial repositories after May 2020. Bitbucket, owned by Atlassian, is a web-based version control repository hosting service, for source code and development projects. It has used Mercurial since the beginning in 2008 and then Git since October 2011."
[1] https://hub.packtpub.com/bitbucket-to-no-longer-support-merc...
(As a disclosure, I'm involved with and contribute to jj, but I don't work for or speak for Google in any way; the above statement is public knowledge.)
It’s an extension from Mercurial as the blog post states.
Prior to that, we used to use 'git5' which was kind of git bolted on in front of Piper, and it worked, but it was a little wonky with explicit import and export steps.
I tried to use fig a little before I left, and I can't say I was entirely blown away. I used to like Mercurial a decade and a half ago, and learned it before git... but it felt very foreign to me now.
It's like submodules, where people 99% of the time have to add the --init --recursive flags anyways, and yet nobody cares to optimize the workflow.
I wish git had better submodules, and better binary asset folders that could be linked and cloned/fetched/pulled/pushed without having to have a complete checkout of the whole repository with all its history.
Oh, and automatic pruning would be nice because my git servers constantly run out of HDD space when I don't do git gc regularly, which oftentimes is broken in itself already.
People who've been using it for years don't notice, they don't even think about it. But when coming from scratch, it's anything but intuitive. The CLI is not discoverable in a reasonable way.
That and there's so many ways to use it.
Mercurial had the advantage of having a much more consistent UX. Though these days I'm sure I'd struggle with it, because I'm so used to git.
Mercurial was never trying to "replace" git. All of these guys came out at the same time. Git got headspace because Linux used it and GitHub was a "cool" Ruby on Rails site, run by cool web 2.0 kids, same era as the rise of Twitter, etc. (And also down all the time, just like Twitter).
I learned and use git because that's just how the industry has moved, and I'm pragmatic enough to just roll with it. But good Lord, the UI is a case study in "programmers shouldn't be allowed to design UIs".
Mercurial even had a couple weeks' head start on git, and git partly happened trying to replace Mercurial in early experimentation. The name "git" was always an interesting self-deprecating choice because it was (intentionally) "stupider" than its competition that it knew about, which included Mercurial (and also darcs/Monotone/Bazaar).
Those are basically all commands I am really ever using:
git status
git add
git rm
git commit
git branch
git checkout -t -b ...
git merge
Learn those and you'll mostly good to go.
Sure, I could to rebase my branches all day and make sure my version history looks "pretty" but I find obsessing with the commit history is a major source of complexity people face when using git. Another usual source of confusion is the branching model. However, that totally depends on your organization. GIT is flexible enough to support all kinds of weird development processes but if it comes over as complicated then don't put the blame on the tool but on its users.
I'm not sure what is currently being done at developing git, but adapting/creating some porcelain commands accommodating a more centralized workflow even mainly on a semantic level could help with the UX friction.
Also, the obligatory joke "git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space"
Example: I tried rebasing or merging, and got merge conflicts. Started resolving them, git-added some of files, but got stuck, and want to get back to the last commit. git-reset doesn't work. How do I get there? No idea. How does the knowledge of commit hashes, branches and staging area help me? It doesn't.
The options on how to proceed seem pretty clear to me.
This is why so many people dislike git. It's a base tool that should have an obvious workflow and very few pitfalls. Instead it allows one to do just about anything at anytime without giving much of a fuck about any resulting mess. All blade, no handle. It's a tool for Linus, by Linus. The average corporate coder is not Linus and doesn't have Linus problems. People don't want a Merkle tree manager, they want a workflow.
(I strongly dislike git and much prefer KISS tools)
* Large projects. It has poor monorepo support (especially on Linux), and also poor multirepos support (submodules are really buggy).
* Large files. LFS is a PoC-level hack; not a proper solution.
* Conflict resolution. The default diff algorithm is very dumb, and even with `zdiff3` it doesn't quite give you enough information to easily resolve all conflicts.
If you want monorepo, use Perforce or SVN, but good luck with the speed ;)
phases
revsets (query language for revisions, they also have filesets for the files)
hg grep --diff
hg fa --deleted
hg absorbIMO, the larger and longer-term problem is that (open source) version control systems seem to be mostly stuck in the early aughts. This may sound provocative, but in principle, Git and Mercurial don't offer much that wasn't already part of Monotone. Meta/Facebook has really been the only actor I am aware of who has been really pushing the envelope in terms of making open source version control more convenient.
If you think I'm being needlessly provocative, just consider this simple example: why don't version control systems (especially ones that can change history) have undo/redo functionality out of the box? I've only seen this as a Facebook extension for Mercurial that never made it into the Mercurial proper (and survived only as part of Sapling).
This is an essential feature of every basic editor nowadays and it is not easy to implement for a VCS, but it's still mind-boggling that after nearly two decades, it isn't considered core functionality of a VCS. Recovering from mistakes remains a pain point in pretty much any VCS, but shouldn't be.
Commit graph visualization is another problem that's just not handled very well by either Git or Mercurial and hasn't really improved much since their early incarnations, if at all. "git log --graph" or "hg log -G" don't really produce output fit for human consumption if you have even a moderately complex branch structure.
Version control systems are still generally very low-level, giving you a lot of primitives and very few high-level operations that aim at making complex workflows less complex.
It's true. And Jujutsu has undo functionality out of the box, too. It's not just Sapling. :) https://github.com/martinvonz/jj
Two blog posts I've seen people point at:
* https://mitchellh.com/writing/github-changesets
* https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
What I found was that he was just sensitive to change. It took him awhile to get comfortable with something but as soon as he did he would from then on resist any change. Anything that was different to what he was used to he hated.
In some sense, it makes sense. People should prefer processes over tools in many cases. If you have a process that works with one tool but doesn't work with a new tool then you might be better off sticking with the original tool. Broken processes can debilitate organizations.
When people say "I hate X" often what they are really saying is "I have a process to do Y that works for me but tool X makes that process too difficult". The problem is they just say "I hate X" so you never really hear about the process Y which provides the context.
I suspect he just hated the constant churn. That's kind of a rational frame of mind when you think about it.
GitHub PR review UI is … fine. But it has very little depth. Unlike an IDE it’s hard to grow into a power user of it. It seems to be optimized for simple reviews with 1-2 rounds of a few comments each.
When you do dozens of code reviews every week you want something more. You want something snappy and dense with keyboard shortcuts. You want something that draws your attention to where it’s needed and something that helps you ensure all your conversations reach resolution.
So there’s a lot of room for improvement and GitHub hasn’t shown much interest in improving this area. So 3p UIs are stepping in (Graphite, CodeApprove, Reviewable, etc)
You want to write 3 patches to a project, that are committed in series, based off of `X`
A ---> B ---> C
X---/
The code reviewer will want to start by reading A, and leaving comments on A. And so on for B, and so on for C. Let's say they leave code review comments on each commit. So now you have a set of things to do.
GitHub encourages you to add a new set of patches on top of the previous 3, so you might publish add commits on top:
A ---> B ---> C --- > D ---> E ---> ...
X---/
In contrast, tools like Gerrit and Phabricator say instead that you should publish new versions of A, B, and C, wholesale. So now we have a new series of 3 patches:
A' ---> B' ---> C'
X---/
A ---> B ---> C
/
/-A' ---> B' ---> C'
X---/
Now here's the question: how does the code reviewer know that you addressed their comments? Answer: they need to do a range diff between the original version 1 series and the version 2 series:
A ---> B ---> C
| | |
d(A,A') d(B,B') d(C,C')
| | |
A' ---> B' ---> C'
This is very useful for example because B might be 500 lines, but responding to review comments may only take 50 lines of fixes. It would be very annoying to re-read the entire 500 line patch, as opposed to just the 50 line incremental patch. This has very big effects as the review cycle goes forth.
People mostly like this review style because it keeps needless "fix review comment" commits out of the history and it "localizes" the unit of code review to each individual patch rather than the whole aggregate. Note that the final version of the series A,B,C will just contain those 3 logical changes, not 3 logical changes + 1 dozen fixup changes.
This not only makes changes more "dense", it improves the ability to navigate the history, and do things like `git blame`; and it means you don't commit things like "fix failing test" which would break bisection.
Note that most of the systems that implement the above review style do not literally use `git range-diff` in their implementation; rather, git range-diff is simply an implementation of this idea that you should review each version of a patch as a diff from the previous version. The tools themselves have their own lifecycle, patch management, APIs, etc that are wholly different from Git's.
Finally, there are lots of things GitHub's UX is just slacking on, functionality aside. You can't comment "anywhere" in a code review, just on changed lines. An annoying one I hate is that you can batch review comments but not batch review resolutions; if you leave 5 comments on a diff, you submit them as a batch. But if you resolve 5 comments, you do it one at a time, which is annoying and easy to lose track of. The UX has too many tabs you have to swap between, which is pointless when you could just make the page a little longer and things like Ctrl+F would work better. And so on, and so forth.
GitHub's PR tool sucks for this. It's also clunky, wastes boatloads of screen real estate, and lacks keyboard shortcuts.
These days I work in GitLab's MR system, and it's meh, but slightly better. But I still miss Gerritt. So much better, even if takes a while to get used to.
I presume there isn’t really any way to have this kind of workflow using git and GitHub? I’d be interested in something like this at my company but we’re sorta locked in to GitHub already.
Code review isn't adversarial, so it's not like the reviewee is closing comments to shove bad code through and they need approvals anyway.
I use it for git all the time for free.
I liked hg a lot when I worked at a place that used it but I've since just sortof defaulted to git for my own stuff since that what everyone seems to be using.
I pay for Jetbrains, so I'm not adverse to spending money on software, but I don't like subscription software like this.
No, I mean when you go to the site and click the second item in the menu, Guide[1].
Jst's post is linked from the second one. (but is a dead link)
When it worked it was fine, but in the end you just got way better service and performance on Github.
The current iteration of Bitbucket isn't even Bitbucket, it's Stash. That works really well to, if you like Atlassian tools.
My understanding is that the work to support OSS builds of Mononoke+EdenFS is happening, but there's no exact timeline right now because (from what I can tell) they basically have to abstract out and write new production storage components for the metadata/object layer, as they can't use their internal ones, obviously.
The scary thing about that one is that I still don't know whether it's just a joke, or if it's the "it's funny because it's true" kind of joke.
There's a much more detailed and complex answer to this question (TL;DR you can kind of fake it in various weird ways without too much effort) but that's probably the best approach if you're willing to fork over some money. Graphite in particular seems pretty well reviewed.
You may also want to look into Sapling and tools like git-branchless, which will change your workflow to better accommodate this kind of thinking.
Also, "git add/rm" is confusing, because they're not opposite of each other -- 'add' puts the file to the stage area, but rm removes it and makes forget.
My pet peeve with bitbucket was that when doing code review, you couldn't send all comments and overall review in a batch, every single comment was received in real time by the author. Sometimes I would be still reviewing code when the author pushed fixes to comments I've made before and that still might need other changes. After 15 years they improved that 2 weeks ago. I'm glad it's better, but I hate it with a burning passion.
Yes SVN has so much better CLI especially for things like
* merging
* history navigation
* searching commit messages, filenames and file content
* bisecting
I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with a centralized revision control system. I used Piper/CitC at Google for years and it could be ... tolerable. Many people just end up using git this way anyways.
But SVN shipped with garbage merge-on-merge support, and that was the deal-breaker for me.
but have you tried bitbucket? Omfg is it slow
https://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/download/
I did not use them because I am on linux only, but I see that Matt is active and responsive, both on the mailing list and chasing bugs on the issue tracker on heptapod ( https://foss.heptapod.net/mercurial/tortoisehg/thg )
Mercurial adopted Python 3 a while ago. Not to mention, huge chunks of it have been rewritten in Rust.
Mercurial has continued to get new features like Changeset Evolution [1] that once you use it, you wonder why all version control systems don’t have it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration-exploitation_dilem...
Unfortunately, I think it's sort of lost on people today, because basically everyone is so stubborn about GitHub and you basically have to drag them kicking and screaming to most other tools, even if they have clearly superior UX, much less fundamental design. I used to run an open-source project and we used Phabricator and most of the regular contributors ended up liking it, but the initial hurdle for people was often like pulling teeth (and it felt like people who didn't contribute because of it never missed an opportunity to tell you so, though that may just be sour grapes on my part from hearing it so often.)
Gerrit isn't beautiful, and it also had a lot of knobs that could be tweaked in weird ways. But I do miss aspects of it.
I have been wanting to check out JetBrain's code review tool and see how it looks.
(source: that’s one of the features that people like most about the review tool I created, CodeApprove)
I like to use that to surface cross-references (annotating anchors whose references appear in changed or context lines, and references whose anchors do).
Not really. It only very recently got support for partial clones, sparse checkouts (still experimental!) `git status` daemon (only on Windows and Mac!), etc. And that's only because Microsoft is pushing it.
> My guess is that people adopt monorepos because they aspire to be Google-scale, but it usually doesn't make sense for their workflow.
Rubbish, it's nothing to do with wanting to be Google-scale. In fact being Google-scale makes a monorepo more difficult and require custom tooling.
The reason people like monorepos is because they don't have the downsides of multirepos:
* Cross-repo changes are very difficult to do and even harder to test.
* Testing code becomes very difficult. For example if you update a library that's in one repo, how do you test all the things that depend on it? Very difficult with multirepos, trivial with monorepos.
* Git's support for submodules is really bad.
The downside of monorepos is that they are big and slow, but they work fine as long as you aren't Google scale.
Which only proves my comment that git is not designed for bigcorp view of monorepos. Kernel is monorepo and works fine.
> The reason people like monorepos is because they don't have the downsides of multirepos:
The reason people like monorepos is that they are lazy to properly organize development process. If you update library in one repo but test it in another, I'd say you need to reconsider your pipeline. But, to each their own.
Not really; it just means you misunderstood what I meant by "large projects". The Linux kernel is not nearly as large as most company codebases.
> The reason people like monorepos is that they are lazy to properly organize development process. If you update library in one repo but test it in another, I'd say you need to reconsider your pipeline.
Sounds like you just don't have any experience of this sort of thing so don't appreciate the problems. You update the library in one repo and test it in another because that other repo is using the library. You want to make sure your library update doesn't break it.
If you don't test all of the dependants of your library then you're massively increasing the risk of breakage (plus all the other downsides) just so you can use separate repos. That isn't worth it.
But in short, it has a better UX than Git by a mile while remaining interoperable at the storage level, so you can use GitHub; it has many of the niceties of Mercurial's UX like revsets, no staging area, and a templating language for log output. Conflict resolution and rebasing is clean, easy, and nearly automatic. It has features neither support, like a real undo command and "operation log"[1]. The UX is smaller and conceptually cleaner; fewer "verbs" that operate on less "nouns", so many things are more regular. It is available as an API (Rust crates) so you can extend it naturally to handle your own workflow, without monkey-patching things. You could even use Mercurial itself as a storage backend, or a custom, centralized server like Google does.
Most importantly though, its internal "automatic snapshot model" design is quite elegant and makes the design and internals very clear. And storage system is completely independent and abstracted from this, and many of the other algorithmic details (Git sort of intertwines the data model, the algorithms, and the UX in various ways.) Features like hg changeset evolution, git rerere, and rebase --update-refs are all obsoleted and naturally handled by this design, among other things.
Martin, the lead developer, also had a talk at Git Merge 2022 that covers many of the fundamentals. They're all still the same but we're evolving many things rapidly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx_LGilOuE4
[1] Yes I know about the reflog, no it is not equivalent! It only tracks changes made to visible references ("ref" "log") while jj's oplog actually tracks commands invoked, and lets you completely undo individual things in the blink of an eye, or rewind if you wish.
Is there anything in jj that could be used as a substitute?
But what I'm most interested in exploring is support for first-class conflicts. I hate the weird state of existing git conflict resolution.
This page covers some of the more advanced functionality: https://graphite.dev/docs/manage-stacks
Either way, I hope you like it! I've tried many other tools that aim to implement stacked diffs for GitHub PRs, and Graphite is _by far_ the best. They have their own Web UI but I skip that completely and just use their CLI + GH's UI.
I really think I just need to actually try the tooling and then examine the git repo. I am very bottom-up brained when it comes to git, and so I need to visualize what commands actually do to the DAG to really grok what's going on.
Although now that I think about it, if hg had displayed a steam locomotive, maybe people wouldn't have noticed how slow it was...
It is the same fate as any cli application that needs to maintain backwards compatibility because it is used both by humans and programmatically as part of scripts. My favorite example of this dd. Most tutorials still show using dd against /dev/sda1 etc instead of using device names as humans should, and meanwhile people keep shooting themselves in the foot.
But a truly user-centric tool would actually help you with something like
"I want to work on a new Feature A" "I want to continue working on Feature B" "I want my changes in the software/product" "I want to review a pull request (haha!) locally, in order to have IDE support." "I did an oopsie and need to go back."
Imagine navigating to a website by specifing its hash, or seeing changes to a PowerPoint file using "git status" and seeing "++slide1.pp". It would be terrible.
- https://github.com/extrawurst/gitui
>Learn those and you'll mostly good to go.
I wasn't really talking about "fancy" features of git, like rebasing history to try to make your history pretty or using things like git bisect. You need to develop basic understanding of git internals, even in the most basic workflow.
I would argue that your list of commands is not in any way complete for being "mostly good to go". At the minimum, you also need to know `git clone`, `git push`, `git pull`, `git fetch`, `git diff`, `git log`, `git blame`, and `git reset` as well. You need to save progress on your current feature branch to context switch to review some PR or analyze some production bug, well add `git stash` to the list. Your boss asked you to hotfix your recent commits onto the release branch? Better not forget `git cherry-pick`.
That brings us to 17 commands (up from the 7 you listed). Fine, it is still a finite number. Can you at least use them as a black box without bothering about the internals? NOPE. You also have to learn a lot of concepts to even understand the help and error messages for these commands - the worktree, the index, the stash, HEAD, ours vs theirs, conflicts, remotes, tracking branches.
Besides, so many commands come with their own gotchas (git checkout will happily overwrite your local changes - without any warning). Some have bad defaults, so you need to figure out which of the hundreds of options that command supports to make it do what you actually want (e.g. git log --oneline and git diff -w -b). Still others have overloaded semantics and do two completely different things (git checkout switches branches but also restores files).
Sure, if you always commit your changes before pulling, then you won't need the stash and (even old CVS documentation reminded us that a VCS tool cannot replace communication) if there are no unrelated changes in the files you're working on, there won't be conflicts, but that just aren't realistic assumptions.
In case you are talking about merge conflicts: That's the nature of distributed development other people might trump on places you are currently working on.
I guess there are more intelligent merge strategies. But GIT gives you a list of files that need a manual merge and you have to look into them one by one. GIT even tells you what to do in this case.
Similarly, there is no concept of stash. The working-copy-commit model removes the need for a distinct "stash" verb, just like it removes the need for the "index" noun.
(In Git, stashes and the staging area are of course trees of blobs, just like ordinary commits. It's just that the UI surfaces them as distinct nouns.)
> This sounds reasonable but I'd like to somehow distinguish these work-on-progress commits. Is there an equivalent of mercurial commit phases?
There isn't any current notion of phases right now, but we've thought of adding them. At the moment, the main distinction added recently is between "immutable" commits and mutable ones, which is determined by a revset, and that revset by default is something like "Anything published on or an ancestor of a head in the remote." Immutable commits cannot be rewritten to a new commit ID.
Frankly I just tag all of my work-in-progress commits with 'wip:', and I use a revset to select and look through every change authored by me that isn't located in the remote main branch.
We are also thinking about improving the color and iconography of the default output to make immutable vs mutable more distinct. So we're not sure if we even need phases yet, I think...
There’s a meme that Git is hard to use but I think it’s conflating the challenges of getting used to version control at all, distributed version control, and any specific tool. I watched a number of developers do that and it was about as much work to go from SVN to either Git or Mercurial, and if they learned the other DVCS it was always easier since they were mapping concepts rather than learning them for the first time. The marginal returns on productivity weren’t worth switching in most cases so it tended to come down to Git being so much faster and, as network effects kicked in, easier to host.
That may be the case for some people, but far from all. Many people who started with cvs or even rcs and have moved on to the newer things as they have appeared still find got annoying and unintuitive. Especially compared to Mercurial.
You use it, because it is now the standard, but you are also very aware of how much cleaner and easier other systems have been.
I’m not saying Git is perfect but simply that it’s hard to separate the difficulties from learning new concepts and working styles from the tool.
There was an interview with Linus Torvalds at some point where he points out that Mercurial was one of the tools he tried using to replace Bitkeeper, but found it to be much to slow. Has he tells it in the interview he later learned that the slowness he experienced was due to a bug in Mercurial and had that not been there, git might never have happened.
If that's true it a little sad, but I also wonder if many of us might still be on SVN, Perforce or whatever. Git, by being a product of Linus brought a lot of focus on Git. Bitkeeper never got the same attention, that was a commercial product, but being used for kernel development didn't see to promote it as much as I'd expect.
Anecdote follows!
I originally started with cvs, and then later, svn. I struggled when git came along, the workflow felt super cumbersome and I kept tripping over the 3 stage process (working directory, staged for commit, and committed), compared to the 2 stage process for already-tracked files in cvs and svn.
After several years, I still never got used to it, and kept having to google when I’d run into random weird issues, having accidentally gotten my repo into a state that had strayed from the basic happy path. Then I started using hg at work, and life got a whole lot easier.
I still haven’t migrated my personal repos off git into hg, mostly because I haven’t (looked for, or) found an hg equivalent of gitea that I can self host, but from my personal experience, day to day usage of git is way harder than day to day usage of hg.
Then again, it helps that I learned hg on the company dime, instead of on my own time.
No. I had used CVS, SVN, SVK, Bazaar, and Mercurial for years before I switched to Git. I can generally explain the internals of all of these tools (a DAG) to someone in simple terms in minutes. Overlaying that onto the commands becomes easy.
What Git does is take that concept and wrap it in the worst possible workflow UI. The people that immediately grafted onto the Git community cheered this on for some reason very early and then recanted by saying that you are really supposed to build "porcelain" for Git since it was meant to be a rough tool.
To this day all I see are articles about people's confusions and conniptions over simple things that Git does incorrectly because it's UI is horrible. Most can't even get to the point where they understand the DAG. Even though I know what is supposed to happen it's hard for me to fumble around with simple commands because the naming is inconsistent and I have to research to find solutions. This was rarely an issue with Mercurial and when I talk to people that have used both they seem to share that sentiment.
Git is the PHP of version control. Widely used and very popular but has a lot of architectural problems that make it a total mess.
We recently adopted a tool that uses Perforce as a backend. It's been interesting to try and describe centralized version control to younger engineers who have only used a dcvs like git.
Not sure about that. Git certainly doesn't make it easier by idiosyncratic use of terms and behavior. Why does 'pull' imply 'checkout'?
Count yourself lucky then. Git was well known for losing data, so much, that it was featured at xkcd [1]. Well, perhaps not the tool itself, but it's user interface was (more than it is now perhaps) so awkward that users often got it wrong. If you don't make that back-up, you might not even know how much you've lost.
I’ve worked in modest sized teams within a larger organization (roughly a hundred developers) and have often been the person people ask for help when something goes wrong; most of our teams went from CVS / Source Safe to Subversion, and then Mercurial to Git, and the big step was really the switch to a distributed system - moving from Hg was largely a non-issue (things got faster, we liked GitLab more for other reasons). The only time Hg lost data was back in the era when rebase was an extension, so it wasn’t the core system’s fault but it was a source of friction.
I am talking of things like "opsie, I don't want to commit this yet" (git reset) and "destroy all my work" (git reset --hard) being a command line switch apart. That's just wrong. That's so wrong I keep git reset --hard safety net around, in fact. https://gist.github.com/chx/85db0ebed1e02ab14b1a65b6024dea29
> In fact, Mercurial usage on Bitbucket is steadily declining, and the percentage of new Bitbucket users choosing Mercurial has fallen to less than 1%.
https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-b...
I'm sure I'm not the only one. The compelling story about Bitbucket for me was Mercurial.
Plus Atlassian is kind of just an awful company.
How so?
Probably the Atlassian product I hate the least.
Annoys the fuck out of me, this conflating git with GitHub.
Yes, because we're talking about comparing BitBucket and GitHub when both are using git. Did you reply to the wrong comment?
It also gets bundled with Jira and Confluence.
pull is fetch + rebase or merge. You can use fetch instead of pull if you prefer. Or `git remote update`, for that matter.
Why is the user exposed to that? If git needs those files checked out for the merge, does it really have to be in the working tree? Why not in a hidden, ephemeral subdirectory? Leave my working tree alone, I say!
Naah, just misunderstood the context,I think. :-)