I'm getting bit by git so often and for those people who are barely programmers are also required to use git to commit their HTML/CSS stuff but once something doesn't work, I have to Google around and waste an hour trying to fix the repo and I'm all for willing to use something else if it's better but I know that people just simply jumped on it because of Linux/Linus name without thinking (kernel workflows are different than most people's but people only realized after feeling the pains) and the git's ecosystem is already far ahead of the others.
I even considered using subversion locally to push to central git but there is no such luck when the reverse is quite possible.
The workflow is faster for new users to learn, less concepts to grok, good GUI support, that's about it
> and for those people who are barely programmers are also required to use git to commit their HTML/CSS stuff but once something doesn't work
You would find that it's difficult to get non programmers to use hg even with a GUI, unless you have some very open minded people
> I know that people just simply jumped on it because of Linux/Linus name without thinking
Not true, so many git users have no idea who made this tool and don't actually care, all they care is that it's open source and suits most of their tasks
Interesting. I’m keen on trying Mercurial, but one thing that has somewhat confused me is the profusion of branch-like workflows. Named branches, bookmarks, now also topics (or whatever it’s called), hidden commits etc.
Is there a good definitive guide somewhere on the best workflows for hg?
I don't know about workflows specifically, but there is a very good reference [0] about Mercurial's branching models. Maybe this will help you.
[0] https://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-m...
What do you mean? It has a section on it:
https://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-m...
(I have not audited to see how accurate the information is, though).
> Then there's some new stuff that apparently are very good, but I can't find a proper description of how they work / should be used.
Yes - I often wished that someone wrote and maintained an article listing all the extensions that one likely will want to use.[1] One you may want to look into is evolve.
[1] Maybe someone has written this - I haven't checked in the last few years.
I personally use bookmarks. They're simple to use. However, people have issues using them in a team setting (by default it doesn't sync the bookmarks when there's a push, I think). I have not explored topics - looking at Heptapod it seems they prefer topics, so it may be the way to go.
If you're the only developer, then bookmarks should do everything you want.
go add a remote to an existing repo. lovely ux there.
and now you're telling me about bookmarks, I've a docs page open to read about phases, that seems kinda neat. at first glance thought it seems like a solved problem of protected branches and separate forks.
The only people who are unhappy with Mercurial are git users. Everyone I know who is coming from something else to Mercurial never have a desire to leave it.
It has a lot (most, really) of the power of Git, but no one has found a need to make an "Oh Shit Hg" site, because it's not trivial to screw up in it.
Because it has a separation between simple and advanced features (many of which are disabled unless you explicitly enable them), you don't get people wasting a lot of time trying to find the ideal workflow in Mercurial. In a sense it's a bit like Perl vs Python. Perl has many ways to do the same thing. Python is more opinionated, and has preferred ways of doing things. As a result, a team of N Mercurial users will usually not have N different workflows. In my current team, there's been a lot of thrash/arguments over the workflow (rebase vs merge, squash vs not, linear vs branched history, history rewriting vs not, etc).
The documentation, though, sucks. It's quite outdated.