deborah: The management regrets that it was unable to find a Gnomic Utterance that was suitably irrelevant. (gnomic)
deborah ([personal profile] deborah) wrote in [site community profile] dw_dev2012-04-29 02:40 pm
Entry tags:

Git, Mercurial, github, bitbucket

I want to spin off a new post from the log of last night's IRC developer meeting. The topic of GitHub came up in the meeting, and some concerns with that idea have been raised in the comments of the previous post. [personal profile] vlion's concerns largely address the difference between mercurial and git, whereas [profile] karelia's concerns also address that difference but touch incidentally on the hypothetical benefit of working in the more public environment of Github.

I was talking to [personal profile] allen and he pointed out that there are really two different issues in play here, because we can go to a shared, public, relatively popular, FLOSS-friendly environment without ever leaving mercurial, namely, Bitbucket.

I'd actually say there are three questions:
  1. Are there benefits to git over mercurial, and if so, are those benefits enough to outweigh the cost of switching to a new source control system?
  2. Would we like to move our source control management to a public, shared, FLOSS-friendly environment? If so, why? Do we think it would be more friendly to our current developers, do we think it would make it easier to bring in new developers, some combination of the two, or something else?
  3. If we want to move to a shared environment, do we feel that there is a strong reason that it should be Github? What are those reasons, if so? If we think git is worse than mercurial, but we do think there's a benefit to moving to Github, which reason should prevail?


Actually, we should probably add a fourth question, which is "would any of our needs be better served by using mercurial more in the fashion for which it was intended?"

Keep in mind when I write these questions that I use github for other projects and like it,and I have never used mercurial intensely enough to have strong feelings about it either way. Personally I fell in love with Perforce at an early date and find all other VCS systems to be it pale yet free imitations. But I do think that if we make a switch like this, these are the questions we need to answer.
allen: "Badass Dreamwidth Dev" on a green background (dwdev)

[personal profile] allen 2012-05-01 12:44 am (UTC)(link)
I do like the idea of moving to a hosted repository, if only so it would be easy to fork for larger coding projects. Would be nice to be able to point to somewhere public to test out an in-progress feature. For that matter, it would be nice to be able to make a shared fork so that more than one developer could easily work on a single feature/bugfix.

I've not really used git, so I can't comment on the relative advantages/disadvantages of it versus Mercurial.

I will say that while git and GitHub are very popular right now, Mercurial is better known among our most important constituency (our current devs).
fu: Close-up of Fu, bringing a scoop of water to her mouth (Default)

[personal profile] fu 2012-05-08 07:53 am (UTC)(link)
Agree entirely on the first paragraph. I want those, and think that the long-term benefits will outweigh the pain of moving.

Re: devs, it's not quite so cut and dried. Our devs are split between knowing cvsreport.pl -d (which has its own sets of problems) and Mercurial. On the other hand, the ones who actually use Mercurial are also more often the ones that are more active as devs.
foxfirefey: A wee rat holds a paw to its mouth. Oh, the shock! (myword)

[personal profile] foxfirefey 2012-05-08 04:27 pm (UTC)(link)
Since cvsreport.pl -d is in the process going away anyway, those folks will have to be changing no matter what we go with!