Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little about mercurial

Re:Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little ab... by DenisM on Saturday December 13, 2008 @06:35PM (#397067)

Alas neither can support effective work in large repositories: at my day job we have about 100gb repository (just one branch), but most people only use 4Gb at a time. Except the build servers - they get the most of the stuff at once. Perforce lets you create partial enlistment and only get the 4gb you need, while both Git and Hg require pulling entire 100Gb over the network.

There's been very little progress on these issues as well - both communities seem to be content with relatively small repositories. Sad.

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Re:Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little ab... by bd on Saturday December 13, 2008 @08:37PM (#397141)

Oh yeah. They both also fail miserably on few large files (hundreds of megabytes). I did tests with 100-200 MB ascii text files and good old Subversion beat both Git and Mercurial easily. Git was better, just several times slower than SVN. For Hg, I had to kill the process.

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Re:Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little ab... by utx00 on Saturday December 13, 2008 @08:15PM (#397125)

you may want to take a look at http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-submodul.... mercurial lacks this as of now.

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Re:Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little ab... by bretthoerner on Saturday December 13, 2008 @10:55PM (#397206)

Mercurial has extension support, and one of them (used for example on the OpenJDK project - a "real" project of some size) is "Forest", which does just that: http://www.bitbucket.org/pmezard/hgforest-crew/overview/

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Re:Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little ab... by DenisM on Sunday December 14, 2008 @12:15AM (#397238)

there is no documentation at all...

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Re:Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little ab... by anthonyb on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:23AM (#397329)

Most things can be found on the Mercurial repository:

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/ForestExtens...

Not sure why there are no docs in the hgforest repository though - that seems like a pretty big oversight.

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Re:Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little ab... by tlrobinson on Saturday December 13, 2008 @09:28PM (#397174)

Jeebus. I'm curious what a 100GB branch contains? Data? Binaries? Images?

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Re:Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little ab... by DenisM on Sunday December 14, 2008 @12:12AM (#397236)

Basically, it's everything that goes into the product.

1. source code

2. toolchain. there are good reasons for it - we had enromous problems with people using outdated toolchains and fighting with obscure compiler bugs. also just installing new toolchain for everyone will not work - it may have new bugs which are only triggered by old code. bottom line is that toolchain must be in sync with the source and it was a painful lesson. I must add that we have dozens if not hundreds of branches.

3. tests. tests must be in sync with the code, and are branched/merged together. a lot of tests.

4. test results. must be in sync with tests and branched/merged together.

So there you have it.

Other people I know who also have large repsitories are art studios who want to version their artwork - they store raw images.

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Re:Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little ab... by qaexl on Monday December 15, 2008 @06:40AM (#398251)

GNOME and Xfree86 are huge git repositories. They "solved" the problem by using git submodules and their project has already been broken down into modules already.

I'm not entirely satisfied with this approach, since it means a brand new developer has to figure out how to pull all the submodules down when setting up his dev environment.

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Re:Ask HN: Why is there so much talk about git but little ab... by thorax on Saturday December 13, 2008 @06:54PM (#397080)

I'm also a big fan of Perforce for large (especially internal) repositories. It handles just about everything smoothly and is also free for Open Source.

That being said, I've really been enjoying working with Mercurial. I think the biggest shortcoming I feel is not being able to branch (easily?) subdirectories rather than repositories.

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