SVN vs. Mercurial vs. Git For Managing Your Home Directory | Hacker News Reader

SVN vs. Mercurial vs. Git For Managing Your Home Directory

joshcarter.com

24 pointschaostheory6 comments

Linus Torvalds actually said Git was probably a bad idea for doing the home directory thing, but that hasn't stopped people from trying. I'd be interested to hear more first-hand stories from other hackers doing the same thing.

One of the problems is Git cannot handle multi-gig files, so if your home includes some virtual machines that you want backed up/sync'd amongst computers, then Git can't be your whole solution.

It would have been nice to also see the numbers for Bazaar, which seems to be #3 on the list of mainstream DVCSs. I adopted hg for $HOME a few months ago, and it's working great. This was after having used SVN for a few years for the same task. I might have chosen bzr for it's amazing attention to usability, but at the time it had some performance issues with 'log'. Although Git has quite a following, I just couldn't adopt it given its enourmous command set (140+ commands), and manual heuristics for when to repack.

Unfortunately, bzr is still pretty slow at log. It's also slow at branching a remote repo, and subsequent merges or pulls from that remote repo. On the bright side, it used to be unusably slow (for large projects, anyway) when doing things like status, diff, or commit, but these have all become considerably faster in recent releases, so there's hope that the still-slow commands will become fast in the future too.

I agree with you about usability. Nearly everything in bzr just works, which was why I ultimately decided against using hg (no dumb server support? ouch!) or git (where you need to understand its internals far too well in order to get anything done).

I always see Mercurial vs Git, but no one ever talks about Monotone, considering it was a major influence on git. Its kind of disappoint b/c its a really great scm.

And it's not like nobody's using it. The Pidgin developers are using it.

Side note: http://www.monotone.ca lists Git/Cogito as an alternative, but not plain Git.

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