[petsc-dev] [mpich-discuss] MPICH migration to git

[Richard Tran Mills]

Git does some very cool stuff, but I have to agree with Sean's 
assessment of the user interface, and that's the reason I prefer 
Mercurial.  This is not so much an issue with PETSc developers, but I 
like that the interface to Mercurial is so clean and simple that I can 
get collaborators who are reticent version control system users to use 
it in a sensible way.  I've gotten many colleagues who were using SVN to 
convert to Mercurial once I showed it to them and they realized that it 
is *easier* to use than SVN even though its capabilities are much more 
sophisticated.  I find that Mercurial sits in a "sweet spot" for me 
between simplicity of use and sophistication of features.

--Richard

On 1/9/13 11:03 PM, Sean Farley wrote:
> [...]
>
> * user interface
>    - git has notoriously had a bad interface and even when I think some
> command will do what I want, it somehow messes up
>    - mercurial has a pretty clean interface for the most part (and more
> importantly) makes typing shorter commands possible
>
> * speed
>    - tough to really say now that Bryan O'Sullivan's patches are in
> mercurial and he's actively working on that front (for Facebook … who
> still uses subversion)
>
> * mutable history
>    - git decides this based on whether there is anything "pointing"
>    - mercurial decides what is rewritable by the phase (public, draft, secret)
>
> This last bit of mutable history is what I've found to be an
> indispensable workflow. I haven't seen any comparison of this
> mercurial feature with modern git (to be fair, it's with a develop
> version of mercurial).


-- 
Richard Tran Mills, Ph.D.
Computational Earth Scientist      | Joint Assistant Professor
Hydrogeochemical Dynamics Team     | EECS and Earth & Planetary Sciences
Oak Ridge National Laboratory      | University of Tennessee, Knoxville
E-mail: rmills at ornl.gov  V: 865-241-3198 http://climate.ornl.gov/~rmills