Firefox development is moving from Mercurial to Git (2023)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1863519

by ReadCarlBarks • 2 years ago

75 85 2 years ago

bugzilla.mozilla.org

(7 months ago, 227 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38160161

dang2• 2 years ago

Thanks! That makes the current post a dupe since 7 months ago is less than a year ago, and 227 comments is significant attention. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

(Reposts are fine on HN after a year or so, or if a story hasn't had significant attention yet.)

altairprime2• 2 years ago

Oh, oops! Sorry, should have emailed.

afavour• 2 years ago

I don't blame them but I do feel there's a certain irony at work. The same forces that lead us in the direction of a browser mono-culture also lead us towards a source control mono-culture!

spondylosaurus• 2 years ago

Is it bad that Git has become a defacto standard? I do think the saturation of GitHub is problematic (for obvious reasons) but at this point Git feels as generic to me as like, I dunno, DNS. Unless there's more going on that I'm not aware of, which is always possible!

w0m• 2 years ago

is github still aggregating ~everything like it used to? I'm interested what effect the Microsoft had on overall adoption.

sverhagen2• 2 years ago

Personally, I enjoy that we rally around a common set of tools, as an industry. And Git is probably the best choice in its category. But that may have to do as much with adoption and network effect as it has with inherent quality. It's an advanced tool, but many folks struggle with the less common tasks, while many others struggle with even fairly basic things like a rebase. In an ideal world, if I imagine it, there'd be a tool like Git that lives at a different plane of usability. And I am unsure that a monoculture would be very encouraging in ever getting us there.

rnewme• 2 years ago

Hit is not as good as mercurial for binary files afaik

myaccountonhn• 2 years ago

Well git was a tool built for bazaar style development. If you’re a closed group of trusted developers, I think fossil is a better solution. Fossil comes with issue tracker, forum, chat and perfect offline support for all of them, and is much much simpler to use than git. Git in general is just very confusing for new users.

Then there is also darcs as an alternative to git that has an innovative approach to patches that has advantages.

Personally I think we have GitHub monoculture in part because git on its own is insufficient. People in general don’t like the email flow (though personally I love it).

throw0101d• 2 years ago

Is it bad that Git has become a defacto standard?

It is a bit of meme/trope that Git's CLI can be a real challenge to use:

* https://xkcd.com/1597/

XorNot• 2 years ago

Get back to me when git wants to put ads in my commit messages.

kfrzcode• 2 years ago

you remind me that as bad as it gets, it could always get worse

CamouflagedKiwi• 2 years ago

The git server can echo whatever it wants down to the client (this is how Github put in those neat URLs to create a PR when you push a new branch) so this is very much already possible.

justin_oaks• 2 years ago

I'm just happy that I can put the days of CVS, Subversion, and Perforce behind me.

While Git has its warts, it's firmly in "good enough" territory.

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

Eh. I thought Subversion was way easier to use (and thus better) than git, which is an absolute nightmare of complexity for people who don't need all the bells and whistles (which is most people). But so it goes, times change and all that.

floating-io4• 2 years ago

Amen.

On the other hand, I do miss things like $Id$...

j16sdiz• 2 years ago

I would rather they focus on their browser product.

Nobody have the energy working on multiple dying projects at once. (except google)

paulddraper• 2 years ago

Firefox is Mozilla's browser product

IntelMiner• 2 years ago

That's a very bike-shedding take. Just because something is better than its competitors does not make it a mono-culture. There's no "nefarious plot" behind git adoption any more than "Linux is causing a UNIX mono-culture"

selcuka• 2 years ago

Tangential, but I'm pretty sure bike-shedding is not the right term here.

sbuttgereit• 2 years ago

Just because something is better than its competitors does not make it a mono-culture.

"Because something is more popular than its competitors" I'd agree with.... but better, I'm not sold: better on what terms? Personally, I had found Mercurial more pleasant to work with and more aligned with my philosophy of change control. In some sense that's "better" from my perspective. Git I find to be a complex hodge-podge that requires monk-like dedication to come to terms with... in some sense that's definitely not better. I always recommend Git to clients. Not because I think it's better, but because I think it's popular enough that random developer-types are likely to have at least passing familiarity with it. Call it network effects. But attribution to "better" may be misplaced.

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

I dunno… sometimes a tool is simply good and self-justifies why it’s broadly useful and used.

SamuelAdams• 2 years ago

Is this actually happening soon? This seems to be linked to a 7 month old issue that is still open.

shortrounddev2• 2 years ago

I tried pulling their mercurial repo once and it took forever

wakawaka285• 2 years ago

Mercurial is notoriously slow, and that is a large repo.

neilv4• 2 years ago

Why GitHub? Of course it's the most popular (due to goodwill before it was acquired, and then inertia), but there are also other options that might be a better match for Mozilla's open mission.

chris_wot4• 2 years ago

GitHub is pretty open, I'm not sure what the problem is.

soperj2• 2 years ago

I like it as a code repo, but issues suck, not being able to duplicate an issue is incredibly annoying. You'd think programmers would make that piece easy, but instead you get a shit ton of button pushing.

weaksauce• 2 years ago

and it's not like there is much of a problem moving from github to xyz later if they feel like they need to. this just makes their burden of infrastructure less and reduce friction with all the contributors. of course bugzilla is still the main way to file bugs/submit patches. the overhead on cinnabar was pretty tangible and real for doing any kind of meaningful work on the codebase with git.

jonhohle• 2 years ago

Historically Mozilla was an enemy of Microsoft, as in Microsoft actively worked to put Netscape out of business and was convicted as an illegal monopoly based on behavior directed at them. There may or may not still be some people involved with the project that harbor resentment or distrust to Microsoft and have little interest in creating an account on one of their services.

whalesalad• 2 years ago

Why not? It’s still the best place to host a code repo.

NilMostChill• 2 years ago

for you perhaps, sure.

"Best" is all kinds of subjective though.

Terretta• 2 years ago

It's not inertia, it's gravity.

There is a pull to be the place things are.

You can find things, and your thing can be found.

bawolff2• 2 years ago

To be honest, i never really understood this mentality for github. Code contribution isn't really the sort of thing people just randomly start doing because they are already on github. Github is not a social network (no matter how hard they might try to push social features)

lolinder6• 2 years ago

Unfortunately the software forge landscape leaves a lot to be desired right now.

GitLab has leaned completely into becoming an enterprise DevSecOps platform at the expense of open source. Their 2015 homepage [0] emphasized its own open source nature and their free offerings. Their current homepage [1] doesn't mention open source at all and only includes the word "free" in the phrase "free trial". The banner at the top of the page currently reads "GitLab 17 & the future of AI-driven development". They've come a long way from being the underdog champion of open source.

Gitea is doing better for now, but the trademark was transferred to a for-profit (Gitea Ltd) and the main gitea.com domain is now being administered by a different for-profit (CommitGo, Inc), with very little transparency about what either of those for-profits are doing and how they'll use their ownership of these key resources. In light of recent license changes by major for-profit open-source companies and the recent behavior of GitLab, I'm not thrilled about Gitea's IP transfer to multiple opaque for-profit companies.

Codeberg.org's fork of Gitea (Forgejo) has a governance structure that is more appealing in that it is not profit-oriented, but I'm nervous about overmoderation in the Forgejo community [2]. Constructive opposition to the election of moderators (based on their past abuse of authority) got edited away as "ad hominem attacks" and has since been completely deleted from the election thread. They're a nonprofit, but after watching the episode linked below unfold and then get swept away entirely I don't trust their governance process at all.

There are other, smaller options that have fewer problems, but none with anything like the features that GitHub offers.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20150316170559/https://about.gitl...

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/

[2] See this HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39397269. The critical comments that had been edited at the time of that HN thread have now been eliminated entirely from the linked issue and the only Internet Archive hit that's left for that page is from after the comments were completely deleted. That's not a good look.

neilv4• 2 years ago

Thanks for the info!

Just a random thought, but would some kind of partnership or merger between Mozilla and Codeberg... be good for both, and for the Internet?

hardwaresofton3• 2 years ago

I could understand if the reasoning to go with GitHub vs GitLab was more about number of developers on platform, but it is hard to accept the reasoning.

You’re chastising GitLab for becoming a platform and chasing enterprise users… The alternative is Microsoft, and supporting a monopoly power.

It seems to me like choosing GitLab would foster a more equal ecosystem of forge choices, kind of like me supporting Mozilla encourages a more equal ecosystem of browsers.

GitLab is still open source and GitHub has never been.

Larrikin• 2 years ago

As someone who just setup Gitea on a personal server, that will strictly be used by me and maybe a couple friend's or family members in the future, is there any down side to just continuing to use it? If its fully self hosted on my server, no connection to any business work, and only used for personal stuff, should I care at all about their governance structure, possible changes to the license, etc? Seems like any kind of shady data sucking changes in an update would have a huge stink made about it.

koolala• 2 years ago

gait

redundantly• 2 years ago

My only concern here is the use of GitHub. This move will give Microsoft more power.

chris_wot4• 2 years ago

How?

wakawaka285• 2 years ago

It promotes reliance on a Microsoft product, and one that rips off your IP to train AI even if you pay for private repos.

oxguy32• 2 years ago

Eh, I mean if GitHub does something really crappy, it wouldn't be _that_ hard for them to move to GitLab or self-hosted. Git remains a free and open standard.

nomel• 2 years ago

Not so trivial if you use GitHub issues, PRs, etc.

zabzonk• 2 years ago

A bit sad (I prefer hg.) But at least just about everyone is now using a VCS, which was very far from the case when I started programming seriously back in the early 1980s.

Firefox development is moving from Mercurial to Git (2023)

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