Hacker News Reader

Comment by markstahler | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised that they are moving towards git and not Mercurial. Isn't Microsoft a sponsor of Mercurial? Perhaps this is because hg already has very good tools for Windows. I suppose I am just a little confused as to why git gets more attention than hg.

View on HN

The article seems pretty clear on that.

"When we made the decision that we were going to take the DVCS plunge, we looked at many options. Should we build something? Buy something? Adopt OSS? We looked at Git, Mercurial and others. It didn’t take long to realize that Git was quickly taking over the DVCS space and, in fact, is virtually synonymous with DVCS."

It's worrying that Git is becoming the OSS "monopoly" in the DVCS space.

For me, this is primarily a reflection of the quality of service and community on Github rather than any quality intrinsic to git. I prefer mercurial to git, but find myself using git significantly more as virtually every dependancy in the apps I build lives on github.

I do think however that there are lots of teams, particularly in enterprise, that are quietly and happily using mercurial.

I think you first have to ask why Microsoft is supporting git when Team Foundation is, itself, Microsoft's primary source control system.

The answer is most likely because people use git. Lots of people use git - particularly the crowd Microsoft is actively struggling to appeal to which is the entrepreneurial/startup crowd.

I've never used hg so I can't attest as to which is "better" but I really don't think that matters to most people. The only question is if it is "good enough" and git is.

The OP is simply saying that it seems odd that Microsoft would pour $20,000+ into Mercurial and then add git support to VS.

http://mercurial.selenic.com/sponsors/

I'd bet this is simply a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. I had no idea Microsoft were sponsoring Mercurial--even that seems odd, spending money on an open source competitor to a product they also make.

I think your analysis is spot on.

It's not like $20k is a lot to Microsoft.

It's more than the $0 it's given git.

Actually, MS has contributed significantly more than $20k worth of developer time to git / libgit2 over the past months, all open source GPL code

This only makes the $20K to Mercurial seem weirder, don't you think? It underscores my point that it's hard for large organizations to keep their official positions on things straight.

From a bigger-picture strategic sense, the Developer Division at Microsoft is concerned about making Microsoft a good platform for developers. Fundamentally, if developers want to use Mercurial on Windows or Git on Windows or TFS on Windows, we're happy. And - increasingly - we'll donate money or even developer time to help make this a good experience.

No, they knew what was happening. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/177875/why-is...

I've been an hg fan for a while and like it better (hg jives with my brain better and git occasionally throws weird problems at me) but quality wise I can't say there is much of a difference in my experience.

That said, I have never met a single other person who uses hg. Not at work or hackathons. Most have never even seen an hg repository and some haven't even heard of it. Git definitely has "won" this "war".

The problem is that large swathes of the Git community have been treating the whole DVCS scene almost in Hunger Games terms -- there can be only one winner, and all the others must die.

For what it's worth, I've heard quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that Git is pretty contentious among many teams that adopt it. Git adoption is often driven by an aggressive few, against the wishes of their colleagues who can be quite unhappy about it. Case in point: Git has more "hates" on amplicate.com than Subversion and TFS put together -- and "hates" outnumber "loves" by something in the region of four to one. (http://amplicate.com/hate/git)

(For reference, Git and TFS have roughly similar market share in the enterprise at the moment, and Subversion is about twice as widely used as either of them. Source: itjobswatch.co.uk)

I use hg for personal projects, but I agree that git has become almost a standard, and, as others mentioned, almost synonymous with the distributed version control systems. My feeling is the differences between git and hg are smaller than the advantages of switching from one to the other and reconditioning yourself to a slightly different work mode. (I guess I should have said "reconditioning myself".)

We use hg for all our stuff at work, and all the openjdk stuff uses it too.

I believe Mozilla uses hg for their source control.

Microsoft initially made Codeplex work with Mercurial. I don't know why Mercurial was chosen over Git at that time, but perhaps it was because of Git's reputation for working poorly under Windows. I suspect that the sponsorship dates to those days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com