Mozilla Firefox Development Finally Moving Entirely To Git

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla Firefox Development Finally Moving Entirely To Git

"FIREFOX DEVELOPMENT IS MOVING FROM MERCURIAL TO GIT," began the email today from Mozilla announcing Firefox is finally shifting over to Git!..

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Going-Git

[orzel]

Too bad for them. Mercurial is far superior.

[cassiofb-dev]

Never heard of mercurial, I'm a bit curious to see why they used it before git.

[Berniyh]

Never heard of mercurial, I'm a bit curious to see why they used it before git.

Most of the time the main reason is because "it's not git".

hg appeared for exactly the same reason that git did and around the same time that git did. Just a different project by a different person, but the goal was the same.

[uid313]

Too bad for them. Mercurial is far superior.

How is Mercurial superior to Git?

Never heard of mercurial, I'm a bit curious to see why they used it before git.

Both Git and Mercurial are 18 year old, so they arrived about at the same time, and maybe they were early adopters before Git became mainstream. Nowadays Git is the dominant version controlled system with a much larger market share than any other version control system. So it is easier to find developers and contributors with experience with Git than any other system.

However, Git was designed explicitly for the needs of the Linux kernel development team and process. Personally I find Git difficult to use and confusing.

[ssokolow]

Funny enough, back when I switched away from Bazaar to Git, I did evaluate Mercurial and the feature I chose Git for was a detail that other people found confusing and a reason to choose Mercurial: The need to stage changes before committing.

I use staging to disentangle unrelated changes I made at the same time (eg. the addition of unrelated TODO comments). I came away with the sense that, if there was a way to enable that workflow in Mercurial, it was probably less well-supported, possibly contrib or even third-party, and, "Damn, is Mercurial customizable to an imposing degree or what?".

[Volta]

Too bad for them. Mercurial is far superior.

Yeah, you know better what's good for them.

[Gusar]

Never heard of mercurial, I'm a bit curious to see why they used it before git.

They went with mercurial over git for one simple reason - better Windows support at the time. After git's Windows support improved, they then continued with mercurial simply because it worked well. But nowadays git is everywhere, while mercurial is almost nowhere. For example, the only reason I have mercurial installed on my system is Firefox. So it makes sense to do the transition now.

How is Mercurial superior to Git?

Significantly easier to understand interface. Doing anything in git is typing in dark magic voodoo incantations. Mercurial is much simpler to grasp. Though I'd say git is more powerful. But unleashing that power, as I said, dark magic voodoo.

[orzel]

How is Mercurial superior to Git?

It's far easier. git is (probably, i hope for them) good for kernel development and Linus way of handling things. But for the rest of us, mercurial is a lot easier. They indeed arrived around the same time, for the same reason (Linus ditching bitkeeper).

At this time, I spent one whole day trying to mess with git painfully, while it took me 5 minutes (hg --help) to be used to mercurial. Granted I was a regular user of previous systems (cvs, subversion, svk).
Years later, git is still extremely difficult to use, even for seasoned users. I use mostly git, i'm a consultant, my clients obviously use that. But when i can, it's mercurial.

Almost all software engineers I'm working with are kinda 'forced' to use git. They suffer a lot of pain, and mostly fail using it : they keep on removing their fubared clones and clone again. They keep copies of their uncommited stuff in case git get in their way, again. They avoid anything fancy like stash/clone/merges or handling several branches like hell. The same for sysadmin.

Until recently, the very best reason to use git over mercurial was the wonderful ecosystem, mostly github/gitlab and such. But fortunately, we now have heptapod.

[bumblebritches57]

You mean to tell me MICROSOFT WINDOWS ADOPTED GIT BEFORE FIREFOX