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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

It's not a given you will use it for the rest of your career. As two examples, neither Google nor Facebook use git.

shrug I'm probably never going to work at either of those places. For pretty much everywhere else, Git works just fine.

Maybe if I play my cards right, I'll use git for the rest of my career. If not, maybe there will be something new eventually, but I imagine that the concepts learned in mastering Git would still be useful.

many places were fine with cvs and svn as well

Was anyone _really_ fine with cvs?

You should give Mercurial a try. When you enable the changeset editing extensions it does everything Git does and is much easier to use and understand. I’ve trained people on both systems and Mercurial is much less creaky. The only reason everyone uses Git is for historical reasons because most of the modules In referring to weren’t added to Mercurial until like 09 when Git started seeing widespread use.

I used mercurial quite a bit back in 2010. It's nice, but I don't see the value in sinking a bunch of time into it these days.

Every one of the projects that I interact with regularly are in a Git repo on some kind of Git hosting service and the projects are run by people who understand/use Git regularly. For those projects, switching to Mercurial is a net loss, even just considering the time it takes to migrate the codebase + related processes (think CI, issue queue integration, even the repo hosting itself).

Sure, I could use hg-git, but that doesn't gain me much either: now I'm the guy with the weird setup. If something goes wrong with my setup, it's too weird for other people to help with. If something goes wrong with somebody else's setup, I'm not that helpful because I have a weird setup.

I'd add that folks should not be forcing the use of git, even within an organization that uses it.

Mercurial works great, has a sane CLI and can both manipulate and interoperate with git repos.

Many of the tools mentioned, at their core, are manipulating the same DAG data structures.

I found Mercurial to be just as capable and much easier to learn. I’m really only considering moving my team to Git as a least-common-denominator move since nobody really makes tools for Mercurial outside of Facebook. Otherwise it’s harder to learn Git and definitely it’s harder to train interns and juniors to use it.

> neither Google nor Facebook use git

What do Google and FB use as their VCS? Also, any source? I don't mean this to be an attack, I am just genuinely amazed by the statement.

Facebook uses Mercurial.

Google uses a custom implementation of the Perforce interface called Piper. Google has looked at git and mercurial, but have concluded that they can't scale to the level they need it to. Read more about it here:

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...

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