[gambit-list] Mercurial

Christian Jaeger christian at pflanze.mine.nu
Fri May 25 10:11:35 EDT 2007


Marc Feeley wrote:
>
> On 25-May-07, at 8:52 AM, Aycan iRiCAN wrote:
>
> > .. It's distributed, interactive and supports  
> > spontaneous
> > branches.

Same thing for Git and probably for Mercurial, right?

>From a cursory look, Mercurial seem pretty much identical to Git, but
written partly in another implementation language (Python (highlevel
stuff) + C (lowlevel) instead of Shell & C (highlevel) + C (lowlevel)),
except that the repository format and maybe the set of tools / their
usage is probably not the same. (I wonder how Mercurial handles
diffing/compression in it's repository format.)

(Maybe Python is a better language than Shell/C. But I'm personally not
really interested in writing Python.)

A nice thing of Git (and perhaps also Mercurial) is it's conceptual
simplicity. Git does not care about tracking diffs, it is conceptually
storing full content for each version, and lets the lowerlevel storage
find out about how to compact them efficiently and the higher level
tools to care about merging. Git can also be used well for non-text
content and that can make it a viable storage system for web
applications and other purposes; although as mentioned I've started
writing another object storage which is better at handling many small
objects (and is planned to be able to garbage collect uninteresting parts)).

I haven't understood yet what Darcs is offering regarding "reordering of
patches".

BTW it seems there is a way to handle GIT repositories with Darcs (I've
never tried it): http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/DarcsGit

http://git.or.cz/ is even going so far as to saying: "Some other
projects have taken the concepts from the Git project and are either
porting an existing toolset to use the Git tools, or reimplementing the
concepts internally, to benefit from the performance improvements. This
includes e.g. Darcs-git <http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/DarcsGit>." I'm not
sure whether Darcs-Git is really offering good performance (and whether
that has been a goal), or whether it is just meant as a way to
interoperate with Git.

Christian.




More information about the Gambit-list mailing list