Re: Git haas gone wild (Rust), freebsd-update

On Wed, 10 Sep 2025 12:31:23 +0100
Norman Gray <gray@nxg.name> wrote:

> Poul-Henning, hello.
> 
> On 9 Sep 2025, at 20:01, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> 
> > Josef 'Jeff' Sipek writes:
> >  
> >>> Or switch to Mercurial, https://www.mercurial-scm.org/ and declare git
> >>> as obsolete  
> >>
> >> I think that's an excellent idea, for both technical and social reasons!  
> >
> > I seem to remember that we had a huge VCS shootout back in previous times
> > and that hg basically lost because they had no way to truly "obliterate"
> > a commit, if for instance laywers waved a credible cease&desist letter.  
> 
> I don't remember that issue, specifically, but I'd think that all DVCSs
> which generate revision/commit IDs based on history would have puzzles here.
> 
> I think that Mercurial lost out to Git mostly for network-effect reasons,
> even though they appeared at almost exactly the same time.  Git was
> obviously heavily, and _noisily_, used for the Linux kernel, and after a
> short time it became the DVCS that 'everyone' had heard of.  That, of
> course, is when the network effects take off.
> 
> Myself, I think Git's interface is poor -- you need to know too much about
> the system before you can do simple things confidently (corroborated by
> teaching the thing to novices).  Bluntly, I think the wrong one won!

Sure.

> I keep meaning to spend time looking at jj [1], which is a DVCS interface
> which aims to be agnostic with respect to the storage system, but which
> defaults to Git as its back end.  The goal appears to be completely
> compatible with Git repos (in the sense that the other people working on a
> repo don't have to know or care that you're using jj), but pull in good
> ideas from Mercurial, Sapling and Darcs.

Unfortunatelly, that means that all fundamental (architectural) problems of
Git are still present (no rename tracking, branches are not really branches,
etc.)

> Best wishes,
> 
> Norman
> 
> 
> [1] https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj
> 



-- 
WBR, @nuclight