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Comment by VladRussian2 | Hacker News Reader

>My suspicion is that open source projects tend towards Git because of GitHub but I think a lot of companies who don't have the option of external code hosting lean towards Mercurial.

GitHub is a consequence not the cause (ponder for a moment why there is no MercurialHub...) It is about ability to choose best source control tool for multi-versioned distributed concurrent development. Open source devs have such choice while corporate ones - no. FB choosing Mercurial tells a lot about environment there.

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That makes no sense. Facebook specifically said they might have chosen git! They had the same choices as any developer except that a) they don't care about github, and b) they wanted to modify the VCS to support massive scale. Apparently out of git and mercurial, mercurial is easier to extend.

There is a well used "MercurialHub", it's called BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/

It supports Git now as well, but it was only for Mercurial use when it started.

I could have sworn bitbucket was an SVN host to start with, then patched in mercurial support and then git support later.

Bitbucket never supported svn (and still doesn't), it was created with django + uses the pure python mercurial (It was one of the major "posterchild" stories for django).

Not sure if it's still django though.

You might be thinking of http://beanstalkapp.com/ which supports svn.

Just re-read the original announcement, it was definitely a mercurial only hosting.

> Over the past couple of months, I've been working on creating a simple but powerful hosting service for Mercurial.

And there is also https://rhodecode.com/

90% of people choose Git because everyone else uses it. Noone has been fired for buying IBM.

I suspect many of us use Git because it was made by Linus Torvalds ( I think everyone agrees that he is a great developer) and is used in the Linux kernel. If it can handle that, then you can be pretty sure it will handle whatever you throw at it (unless you are Facebook, it seems).

Add Github to that mix and you can see why so many developers sleep like babies at night. Of course it's not rigorous, but the choice is not irrational.

The linux kernel is much smaller than the entire codebase of Facebook.

Most projects are smaller than the Linux kernel though. Or start out that way.

Isn't MercurialHub called Bitbucket?

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