Re: Deciding between Git/Mercurial

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 28, 2009, 11:01 UTC
Message-ID: <94a0d4530909280401q4a451697re8954320682662f2@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0909281059180.4985@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> I tried to refrain from commenting in this thread, because I do not want
> to encourage people just to use msysGit and never even attempt to fix
> their own issues.
>
> But I cannot let this go uncommented:
>
> On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>
>> IMO the key difference between hg and git is the storage model: hg
>> stores deltas, while git stores snapshots. That would mean that certain
>> operations are theoretically faster in git (e.g. checkout, diff) while
>> others faster in hg, although with git's packed format I guess there's
>> no operation faster in hg. This means that it doesn't matter how much
>> hg's python code improves, or if they even re-write parts in C, they
>> will never be able to match git's performance (unless they change the
>> storage model, which essentially means changing the whole design --
>> won't happen).
>
> That is wrong.  "git log -- <file>" will always be slightly faster in
> Mercurial, for all the reasons you mentioned.

Ok, thanks for pointing that out. I was thinking that maybe 'git blame' would also be slightly faster on hg, but I really don't know. Anyway, I think for most operations git would always be faster, and more importantly; some essential operations will be faster (checkout, diff <committish>).

-- 
Felipe Contreras