Re: Alternative DVCS to git: hg?

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 04/16, Mayuresh wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 01:52:26PM -0500, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> > Yes, it's a good alternative.  I use it for most of my projects.  It's
> > also used by a number of large projects such as Firefox, nginx, and
> > OpenJDK, and I gather it's on a short list of VCSes being evaluated by
> > NetBSD as its next VCS (which would replace CVS).
> 
> I also read somewhere facebook picking it, and also heavily contributing
> to it.

Yes, perhaps it was the "Scaling Mercurial at Facebook" post from 2014

  https://code.fb.com/core-data/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/

> I am just intrigued by it being written in python (except may be for the
> merge algorithm which is in C). Wouldn't most engineers prefer C/C++ for
> such a low level and key component?

I'm sure some would.  But others believe it's a better choice to write
software in a high-level language (for various reasons which might
include speed of development, ease of readability, security (e.g.,
built-in protection from certain classes of security vulnerabilities),
libraries, ease of cross-platform development, etc.).  If something
is known to be or is discovered that is measurably too slow and the
application spends a significant amount of time there, then the
developers will spend effort improving the speed there.  This may be
done within the high-level language, or it might be done by writing
parts of the application in C.
 
> Regarding NetBSD, pkgsrc-wip was moved to git and pkgsrc has a git view of
> its CVS repo. So I thought git was more likely candidate in NetBSD.

Hmm, not sure about that.  See

  https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-repository/2017/09/01/msg000647.html

and the "NetBSD & Mercurial: One year later" talk

  https://pkgsrc.org/pkgsrcCon/2018/talks.html

and

  https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-repository/2019/02/12/msg000664.html

> It will help if list members with experience of both git and hg could
> share some pros and cons of both. (No flame war meant!)

A lot of people have wondered the same thing, and there's lots written
on the web about it.

Regards,

Lewis