Re:Firefox Development Is Moving from Mercurial to Git
by magicalhippo on Monday November 06, 2023 @04:49AM
(#38160538)
Having used Mercurial for years in OSS projects before switching, my view is that pull requests on Github was a major factor.
There wasn't a similar offering for Mercurial, in part I think because of the fundamentally different way Git and Mercurial treated (treats?) branches. In Mercurial branches were permanent, so a PR-like flow would leave a lot of stale branches around.
Mercurial also didn't support rewriting history as a core philosophical choice.
It was introduced via a plugin but that meant each dev had to enable it to use it. AFAIK it has been moved into the core, but I think too late.
At least as a primarily Mercurial user at the time, I feel Git didn't really outcompete Mercurial until Github and PRs came along. It just allowed for much smoother cooperation.
There wasn't a similar offering for Mercurial, in part I think because of the fundamentally different way Git and Mercurial treated (treats?) branches. In Mercurial branches were permanent, so a PR-like flow would leave a lot of stale branches around.
Mercurial also didn't support rewriting history as a core philosophical choice.
It was introduced via a plugin but that meant each dev had to enable it to use it. AFAIK it has been moved into the core, but I think too late.
At least as a primarily Mercurial user at the time, I feel Git didn't really outcompete Mercurial until Github and PRs came along. It just allowed for much smoother cooperation.