mercurial – Mithat Konar (the blog)

Why aren’t you on GitHub?

Only one of my 20 or so public repositories is currently on GitHub. The remainder are mostly on Bitbucket. I am seriously considering moving my public Git repos to Gitorious.

Why, when everyone and their mother is shoving heaps of projects at GitHub, would you consider anything else? It’s precisely because GitHub has become the defacto standard that I am trying to avoid it. The Git/Github conflation is bad enough (GitHub invented Git, right?), but it’s also disconcerting that Github (a private Saas company) is creating a virtual (!) monopoly in the field. Given that, I think it’s a good idea to support credible alternatives.

I originally started using Bitbucket because they offered Mercurial hosting. This was back when Git support on anything but POSIXy systems was pretty poopy and Mercurial was the friendly, multi-platform alternative. Bitbucket offered features on a par with Github and were quite generous with their no-cost offerings (and still are). Eventually, Bitbucket saw the writing on the wall and introduced Git hosting alongside Mercurial. Later, I too conceded that Git had won the DVCS race and switched to Git as my default DVCS. However, I saw no reason to change where I hosted my public repos—especially in view of GitHub’s growing dominance.

Both Bitbucket and GitHub are private Saas companies that make money hosting private repositories and/or offering additional services. Gitorious is as well but with one difference: the platform that runs Gitorious is FOSS that you can install on your own servers. Which means you get all the Saas perks along with all the great things that go along with FOSS. The range of features that Gitorious has added over the years has grown to the point where I think it’s worth a serious look. I’ll report back when I have more info.

Update: Another worthy contender is GitLab Cloud. It runs on GitLab’s own software—which has an open source version (MIT license). I’ll be taking a close look at that as well in the upcoming days.

Git again

I’ve finally gotten around to using Git instead of Mercurial on a project. So far it has been uneventful. I still prefer Mercurial because it treats all OSes as first class citizens and because I think the CLI is cleaner. My workflow doesn’t require a lot of branching, but Git fans seem to think it really shines there. My main motivation for going Git on this project is to get some experience with what will likely become the defacto standard DVCS.

I am mostly using ~~git-cola~~ git gui as a GUI frontend. Ironically, git-cola—like Mercurial but unlike Git itself—is Python powered.

The best resource I’ve found so far for working with Git if you already know DVCS fundamentals is Spherical’s “Git for the lazy.” Entp’s “Version Control for Designers” is pretty good too.

Gradually going Git?

I’ve been using Mercurial along with Bitbucket for project hosting for quite a while now. I’ve also grown quite fond of EasyMercurial to help manage my repositories. However, I have started to wonder if I should consider using Git as my defacto standard VCS.

I was originally attracted to Mercurial over Git because I got the sense that Git was an almost hackish amalgam of various scripts written in a variety of languages—and because it encapsulated a lot more “power” (read: “complexity”) than I saw myself needing. And while Linux was (and is) my main OS, Windows support for Git was sorta grimmish. Bitbucket’s hosting policies at the time seemed better than the closest Git-equivalent: GitHub (still do—BB’s unlimited private repos in particular), and Redmine offered an easy self-hosted project management solution including repository, wiki, issue reporting, etc. as well. Gitourious was available at the time but was (and is) feature incomplete compared to Redmine. I can’t remember if Trac supported either at this point.

So why consider changing? I’ve recently noticed what appears to be a mad rush to use Git in general and GitHub in particular–so much so that I’m wondering if Git is going to become the defacto industry standard soon. Changing to Git may not be as huge a deal as it might seem at first because Bitbucket, RhodeCode and Trac now let you use Git repositories in addition to Mercurial, and it seems Git’s support for Windows has improved. There are also a number of GUI Git clients available for all major platforms—though none of them seem as sweetly usable as EasyMercurial.

I may just try managing my next project with Git as a test-case. Worst case: convert the Git repo to Mercurial.