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Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, what about Git's branches and history management is better than Mercurials with the appropriate plugins turned on?

I've been able to successfully replicate all the Git use cases I can think of in Mercurial even if I think they are bad practices. Conversely, nothing I do makes git's cli anywhere near as good as hg. For me, that is the single biggest glaring problem with Git. I spend a very small minority of my time handling complicated history/branch issues as part of my major workflow and I spend an inordinate amount of time working with the interface to my source control. Git seems optimized for the minority case.

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I a not mega familiar with mercurial, but I was under the impression that culturally, rebasing is considered bad. Yes, there is a rebase plug-in, but mercurial users don't generally think it's a good idea to mutate history. Git users tend to branch, make a ton of commits, then clean them up using rebase and then merge and push. hg users tend to... not?

I may be _entirely_ off base here.

(personally I find git's command line to be fantastic, but I often feel like I'm the only one.)

I think the view you present here is outdated. Today, rebasing is used a lot by Mercurial users. Even for the development of Mercurial itself, rebasing is not considered bad, it's considered a requirement for submitting a patch series. That is, the patches are sent by email and applied with 'hg import', and thus implicitly rebased. If that causes too many merge conflicts, you will be asked to rebase it yourself and resubmit it.

Mutating history is front and center in the changeset evolution framework people have been working on for some years now. The first step is that Mercurial tracks when it's safe to rebase or edit a commit: each commit has a "phase" which is "draft" initially, but changes to "public" when you push the commit somewhere. The history editing tools ('hg rebase', 'hg histedit', 'hg commit --amend') will then tell you when it's unsafe to edit a commit.

Exactly. Although rebasing is convenient, it does involve taking destructive actions on a repository which is ostensibly a tool to make sure your data isn't lost. The feeling in the Mercurial community is that this is potentially dangerous and not necessary.

Really, it would be best if there was some way to retain the original commits while rebasing to clean the history. Time for a new DVCS?

> Really, it would be best if there was some way to retain the original commits while rebasing to clean the history. Time for a new DVCS?

When you rebase, commits are not lost. If there is a ref pointing at them then they will continue to stick around. If there isn't then the next time that gc is run they would be removed.

The solution to what you are looking for is to precede each rebase with a command to 'anchor' the current commit under a custom ref. If you wanted to look back in time, you'd use a corresponding command. This is all, say, 20 lines of shell, primarily using the git plumbing..

Of course this is just recreating a permanent reflog-work-alike, reflog of course already having this usecase covered for individual devs working on their machines...

If it is the other usecase of rebasing, rebasing public code, say on a centralized repo or the repo of your build fleet, that has you concerned, then instead of just set a policy of only permitting fast-forward commits in those cases. That is a reasonable thing to do, it is a legitimate workflow that git supports. There is no reason that you cannot keep auditable logs of exactly what has been going on with your git repo.

I think people hear "rewrites history" and let their imaginations run wild with sci-fi tales of wonder, only then to think of the grave horrors such power would enable... but forget to look at what actually is happening when you "rewrite history" in git. There is no reason to fear it.

> I think people hear "rewrites history" and let their imaginations run wild with sci-fi tales of wonder, only then to think of the grave horrors such power would enable... but forget to look at what actually is happening when you "rewrite history" in git. There is no reason to fear it.

Yeah, I very much agree with this. Rewriting history is a tool, a very powerful tool. It's something you can use if you want to.

It reminds me a little of a discussion I had recently with a developer who mostly used statically typed languages. I'm using to dynamically typed languages like Python and JavaScript, so it was puzzling for me to hear him talk about the horrors of dynamic types. He said things like "I pass a Person object to a function and the function might do anything with it -- like adding new methods and fields to it!". Yes, it is true that you can add a new method to an object in most dynamically typed languages. No, adding methods and fields by accident is not really a problem in real life.

Just because you have the option of doing something, doesn't mean that you must do it.

Why bother? Even if the history of some off-branch is messy as heck, it can be summed up in the merge anyway.

To use bookmarks, I have to convince the whole team to use bookmarks. Why not convince them to switch to git instead? I use Mercurial plugins to give me commands that make my life better, like `pull --rebase`, `shelve` and `strip`, but getting coworkers on the bandwagon requires explaining which extensions to install instead of pointing to the man page for the appropriate command.

My git workflow is probably replicable in Mercurial, but git does it by default.

(OP here) You don't need to tell the rest of the team if you're using bookmarks, just like you don't need to tell the rest of your team the names of your Git branches.

Bookmarks stay local by default, but they can be exported to the server if you like. There's nothing to enable any longer since it's a core feature.

Mercurial also has named branches. Which suck. I'd rather use bookmarks, but my team uses named branches, so that's what I have to use as well. This problem wouldn't exist with git.

So, why do named branches suck? We use both, named branches and bookmarks, but for different things and it works great.

> which extensions to install

I don't think you need to install those extensions, you just enable them by putting a line in .hgrc

Mercurial ships with 30+ standard extensions and you simply enable them as needed. More experienced users can download and then install third-party extensions as they like.

This of them as major modes for Emacs, if you're familiar with that. Emacs comes with syntax highlighting support for a lot of languages and the mode is turned on automatically. Sometimes you need to install a new major mode yourself, but the bundled modes get you a long way.

I find git's CLI pretty efficient: most of the time it is just commit/rebase/push/pull.

The reverse question is, what about Mercurials UI is better than gits with the appropriate aliases and wrapper scripts?

In both cases the answer is pretty much nothing.

Git is not optimized for the minority case, it is optimized for simple implementation. It basically leaks implementation details left and right. I believe git users come to like this, because the core model is so simple (for a computer scientist). Git internally is just snapshots of the code connected with prev-version edges forming a directed acyclic graph and then some named pointers into this DAG.

> what about Git's branches and history management is better than Mercurials with the appropriate plugins turned on?

I don't know which it better, but at least different: git has automatic garbage collection for dangling commits (after 30 days or so by default).

With Mercurial, if you want to remove dangling commits, you have to do it by hand. And if they have been pushed, you have to go to the remote repo and manually remove them there too. And everyone else who has pulled them, will need to manually remove them.

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