On Jan 9, 2013, at 10:35 PM, Richard Tran Mills <rtm at eecs.utk.edu> wrote:
> Git does some very cool stuff, but I have to agree with Sean's assessment of > the user interface, and that's the reason I prefer Mercurial. This is not so > much an issue with PETSc developers, but I like that the interface to > Mercurial is so clean and simple that I can get collaborators who are > reticent version control system users to use it in a sensible way. I've > gotten many colleagues who were using SVN to convert to Mercurial once I > showed it to them and they realized that it is *easier* to use than SVN even > though its capabilities are much more sophisticated. I find that Mercurial > sits in a "sweet spot" for me between simplicity of use and sophistication of > features. Very good point! If many of our scientific collaborators will be overwhelmed by git but are able to use mercurial that is reason enough to stay with hg. Barry > > --Richard > > On 1/9/13 11:03 PM, Sean Farley wrote: >> [...] >> >> * user interface >> - git has notoriously had a bad interface and even when I think some >> command will do what I want, it somehow messes up >> - mercurial has a pretty clean interface for the most part (and more >> importantly) makes typing shorter commands possible >> >> * speed >> - tough to really say now that Bryan O'Sullivan's patches are in >> mercurial and he's actively working on that front (for Facebook ? who >> still uses subversion) >> >> * mutable history >> - git decides this based on whether there is anything "pointing" >> - mercurial decides what is rewritable by the phase (public, draft, secret) >> >> This last bit of mutable history is what I've found to be an >> indispensable workflow. I haven't seen any comparison of this >> mercurial feature with modern git (to be fair, it's with a develop >> version of mercurial). > > > -- > Richard Tran Mills, Ph.D. > Computational Earth Scientist | Joint Assistant Professor > Hydrogeochemical Dynamics Team | EECS and Earth & Planetary Sciences > Oak Ridge National Laboratory | University of Tennessee, Knoxville > E-mail: rmills at ornl.gov V: 865-241-3198 http://climate.ornl.gov/~rmills >
