Re: [VOTE] git versus mercurial (for DragonflyBSD)

Am Sonntag 26 Oktober 2008 19:55:09 schrieb Jakub Narebski:

What do you mean by "cleaner design"? 

From what I see (and in my definition of "design"), Mercurial is designed as VCS with very clear and clean design, which even keeps things like streaming disk access in mind.

Also, looking at git, git users still have to garbage collect regularly, which shows to me that the design wasn't really cleaner.

As an example: If I want some revision in hg, my repository just reads the files in the store, jumps to the latest snapshots, adds the changes after these and has the data.

In git is has to check all changesets which affect the file. 

If you read the hgbook, you'll find one especially nice comment: 

"Unlike many revision control systems, the concepts upon which Mercurial is 
built are simple enough that it’s easy to understand how the software really 
works. Knowing this certainly isn’t necessary, but I find it useful to have a 
“mental model” of what’s going on."
- http://hgbook.red-bean.com/hgbookch4.html

I really like that, and in my opinion it is a great compliment to hg, for two reasons:

1) Hg is easy to understand
2) You don't have to understand it to use it

And both are indications of a good design, the first of the core, the second of the UI.

Best wishes, Arne

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