This blog entry is part of an Atlassian blog series focusing on teams switching to distributed version control systems (DVCS) like Git or Mercurial (Hg). You can find the other posts in this series under the Switch to DVCS tag. This is a guest blog post by Steve Losh focusing on the primary reasons a team may choose Mercurial as their (distributed) version control system. Check out Steve’s projects to see some of the cool things he has worked on around Distributed Version Control, or jump over to his Bitbucket account and fork one of his many projects. In our previous posts, we talked about the history of version control and why it’s a good thing, as well as why distributed version control systems are better than centralized systems. There are two major distributed version control systems in widespread use today: Mercurial (Hg) and Git. There are many reasons (and opinions) why one would choose Git or Hg, and the next two blog posts in this series aim to explain some of these Whys. A Sane Command Line Interface The command line interface is the first thing many programmers will see when using a new version control system. Mercurial’s CLI is full-featured, stable, and elegant. It follows the UNIX philosophy: “each command should do one thing and do it well.” Git’s CLI is designed to be extremely flexible. Each command has many options that can change its behavior. This makes for less typing, but requires you to remember all of the various options and how they interact with each other. Git’s documentation must detail all the interactions between options, which makes it more verbose and difficult to skim. Mercurial’s simple approach leads to documentation which is sleek and concise. It’s easy to find what you’re looking for — using hg help, so you can spend less time looking at docs and get back to coding. It favors clarity over “cleverness”, which makes for an easier-to-use tool. Mercurial tries to be helpful by anticipating some of the more common aliases for commands and just making them work. For example, the hg rename command can also be run with hg move or hg mv. Git simply gives you a git mv command. You can create your own git move alias if you like, but that’s yet another step to try to make Git’s CLI pleasant to use while Mercurial’s is pleasant by default. Mercurial’s CLI is also quite similar to Subversion’s, which can help ease the transition between the two tools. Here’s a comparison of some of the most common commands. Mercurial/Git commands that are the same as their Subversion equivalents are bold. Subversion (SVN) Mercurial (Hg) Git svn add hg add git add svn blame hg blame git blame svn cat hg cat git show svn checkout hg clone git clone svn commit hg commit ; hg push git commit -a ; git push svn delete/remove hg remove git rm svn diff hg diff git diff, git diff –cached svn help hg help git help svn log hg log git log svn revert hg revert git [...]
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