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

[Barry Smith]

On Jan 9, 2013, at 10:35 PM, Richard Tran Mills <rtm at eecs.utk.edu> wrote:

> 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.

   Very good point! If many of our scientific collaborators will be overwhelmed by git but are able to use mercurial that is reason enough to stay with hg.

   Barry

> 
> --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
>