Codeplex donates $25,000 to Mercurial

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codeplex/archive/2010/09/06/codeplex-com-donates-25-000-to-mercurial-project.aspx

55 26 16 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

walkon2• 16 years ago

Perhaps they have or will soon, but you'd think Fog Creek (Joel Spolsky) would want to donate a bit as well since Kiln revolves around Mercurial:

http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/

KTamas• 16 years ago

Except Fog Creek is a gold sponsor already: http://mercurial.selenic.com/sponsors/

walkon2• 16 years ago

Ah, very good, that's why I said, "perhaps they have" - thanks for the link.

benatkin• 16 years ago

At least $20K. Impressive.

paulitex2• 16 years ago

Fantastic. Though what Mercurial needs even more than Matt's full time attention is a really good forge. Bitbucket just really doesn't hold a candle to Github (and codeplex is pretty unattractive for anyone not a microsoft dev).

It's a genuine problem (for me at least) when starting a new project - bitbucket (-) and Mercurial (+) or github (+) and git (-). If anyone from github is reading this - please consider first-class Mercurial support. It would almost definitely be easier for you to do this than for bitbucket to make up the gap.

(I know lots of people prefer git, but Github already has that market pretty cornered. There is an opportunity among those who prefer hg.)

cageface2• 16 years ago

What is it about HG you prefer? Git and HG seem pretty comparable as far as features go but github seems to have all the momentum.

paulitex2• 16 years ago

SCM preference is very much a religious debate, and I don't really want to start one... but my instinct would be to say the interface is a lot more intuitive than git. Also, it's what I know. I worked on Mercurial as part of a school-sponsered thing similar to GSOC, so my competency is pretty high with hg, while git tends to get me in trouble and generally scares me. I know I could probably learn my way out of this, but it's the honest answer.

stevelosh2• 16 years ago

I'm not the OP, but I'll give my reasoning for preferring Mercurial: its CLI has commands that each do one thing instead of commands that have options to do anything.

For example: `git checkout` can change the contents of files without changing where you are in the DAG, change where you are in the DAG, and even create a new branch. In Mercurial you'd use three separate commands for these things: `hg revert`, `hg update`, and `hg branch`.

The problem with git's approach is this: making every command very flexible through options means that you need to document the interaction of all these options in the man pages. That makes the documentation for each command harder to read, especially when you're in the middle of trying to get something done with a project and just want to do something quickly.

For a real example, look at the help for the two SCMs' commands for changing the contents of a file:

    $ (hg help revert) | wc -l
          47
    $ (git help checkout) | wc -l
         276

Some might say: "But `git checkout` can do so much more than `hg revert`!" That's absolutely true. However, every time I want to look up how to revert file contents I need to wade through hundreds of irrelevant lines in git's documentation. When I'm using Mercurial I say "Well, I know I need to use `hg revert`, let's just look at those 47 lines of help and find out what exactly I need."

When you combine the help for the equivalent Mercurial commands it's still more succinct than git's help, because splitting individual actions into different commands means you don't have to document interactions between options:

    $ (hg help revert; hg help update; hg help branch) | wc -l
         113
    $ (git help checkout) | wc -l
         276

TL;DR version: Git's decision to make its CLI's commands very flexible results in painful documentation, so I perfer Mercurial.

lars5122• 16 years ago

Let's agree that Git has more momentum, and GitHub the best hosting interface available. The main reason to choose Mercurial in the face of this is that it's command line interface seems far more well thought out than Git's. Given how much time you spend interacting with the repository on the command-line, this is hugely significant.

bfung• 16 years ago

why not http://hg-git.github.com/? hg commands on a git repo.

brodie• 16 years ago

Is there anything specific that you think Bitbucket is missing or lagging behind in compared to Github?

sandGorgon2• 16 years ago

When we wanted to begin a new project - our choice of SCM and forge went hand-in-hand.

The big plus of hg is that it will work on all platforms - Win (yup), OSX, Linux The big plus of bitbucket is that it does not limit the number of users you can add to your project - github's paid plans limit number of users.

I'm sure github has a hell of a lot of features, but we dont use most of them - what we do use, the pricing model of bitbucket makes more sense.

snprbob864• 16 years ago

The user limits are a good thing: Let teams and individuals fork the projects. Favor more, smaller projects of better factored code, each with key trusted contributors. If your teams are large enough, you should have lieutenants performing code reviews upon pull request. Embrace the distributed model.

eru• 16 years ago

Git works now on Windows, too.

pjhyett• 16 years ago

Our organization plans support unlimited teams/users: http://github.com/plans

josephcooney• 16 years ago

I'm genuinely curious - what's the main reason you discount codeplex? It doesn't have any restrictions on the languages/frameworks/target platforms etc, and you can choose any license you want. Is it that Microsoft just have a lot of banked hate-debt?

Codeplex donates $25,000 to Mercurial

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