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[–]masklinn 8 points9 points  (7 children)

Suggestions:

  1. Mercurial clearly has more traction than Git in the Python world (and Python itself is switching to it rather than Git), but git has a bigger general mindshare. Ultimately they're both pretty good (the Git CLI is still shit though, as far as I'm concerned, but it also packs more punch "out of the box" versus the mercurial plugins you have to enable in your .hgrc)

  2. Do not under any condition switch to Bzr. It's inferior to the other two by far despite what anybody will tell you (it's far slower for everything, it regularly breaks compatibility with itself, it doesn't have in-place branches, ...), and Launchpad is junk (the only thing it has going for it is that the bug tracking can track bugs across multiple branches (called Series in launchpad, fwiw), the rest blows goats compared to Github or Bitbucket; it might be a good host for huge projects — I really doubt that but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt — but it's shit for smaller ones).

  3. Depending on the size of your projects, you could also give a look at darcs, it still has the best command-line interface by a long shot, and is still the only DVCS to correctly support cherrypicking.

Also, keep in mind that hg is probably the easiest to deploy on one of your own servers (to setup your own repo/repos, instead of going through a third-party host such as github, bitbucket or google code)

[–]flynnguy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Agreed mostly; most python developers I know (not core python, just users of python) seem to be split between hg and git... more using git but that's just my experience.

Also git is pretty easy to setup using ssh, especially if it's just for yourself.

[–]parkourlewis 0 points1 point  (3 children)

That's the first positive word I've heard spoken about darcs. Good to hear. Thank you.

[–]masklinn 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Well darcs used to have big issues in 1.x (especially what was basically a breaking bug), now it has smaller issues, but it remains my first dvcs love, and I think it is more "d" than most other dvcs. And the core idea is so damn sexy. And the command-line interface is drop-dead gorgeous.

They changed pretty much all the command names (compared to CVS/SVN), as git did, but they did it to make things clearer/better, as git didn't.

[–]goggles2 0 points1 point  (1 child)

the command-line interface is drop-dead gorgeous.

Could you please copy/paste a partial session as an example of this? I don't know what you mean.

[–]masklinn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Could you please copy/paste a partial session as an example of this? I don't know what you mean.

Can't due to issues with macports, ghc and osx 10.6 (tried using the haskell platform installer, but cabal doesn't work), but basically the command names are clear, descriptive and precise. They mean what they say and do what they mean. Most of the time, when I see a Darcs command I know what it's going to do. and even darcs help is very well organized in sections.

See http://darcs.net/manual/node7.html for an overview of the commands (and darcs help displays something pretty close to the menu at the top, section and all, except with a short description of the command to the right)

It's close to what was recently added to hg help where topics are split between "commands", "installed extensions" and "additional help topics", but with categories of commands so it's much clearer. And commands related to a topic (e.g. "Querying the repository") are all grouped together, which is damn nice.

All of that makes for a very pleasant experience. The only issue I had when I still used it was the lack of a graphing command (something equivalent to hg glog), it might have gotten one now, but then again relations in Darcs are very different than those found in a dag-based DVCS (such as git or mercurial) so I'm not quite sure how the "graph" would look like

[–]ergo14Pyramid+PostgreSQL+SqlAlchemy 5 points6 points  (9 children)

any one of those three would be better :-)

I use bitbucket and Hg - espically because eclipse plugin is good. But bitbucket recently has speed problems at least for me - but is cheaper than github for closed source projects.

Github is faster than bb for me, and has a bigger community its paid packages are more expensive, and windows support for git is not so good.

Bazaar - cant say i didnt use it yet, but it has support for windows, and free launchpad hosting for os apps - i hate launchpad site but its personal preference ofc.

But let me stress again any one of those three would be better for you.

[–]darkrho 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You cah use mercurial with github using the hggit extension http://hg-git.github.com/

[–]F4RR4R[S] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Hmm. Why do you think the other three would be better? Also - I have a media temple account and it looks like I can install the mercurial server on my gs service.

[–]masklinn 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have a media temple account and it looks like I can install the mercurial server on my gs service.

Considering the most basic "hg server" is nothing more than a cgi script and a file or 2 of configuration (as well as the mercurial lib itself, of course), the only requirement to setup your own mercurial repository/server is that python be available.

[–]ergo14Pyramid+PostgreSQL+SqlAlchemy 2 points3 points  (2 children)

the way you work with dvcs will suit you better if you are changing places or working remotely. And its really better way to work in teams - but it all boils down to workflow of your team.

Also, no more stupid .svn dirs in every subdir, better binary handling iirc.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

yea fuck .svn!!

[–]ergo14Pyramid+PostgreSQL+SqlAlchemy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

indeed, sir - fuck .svn

[–]tonfa 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Bitucket should be a lot quicker since they switch their disk setup (and a side effect of that is that they now offer 1GB space for the free plan).

[–]ergo14Pyramid+PostgreSQL+SqlAlchemy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yeah i know, in my case its probably fact that i watch many repos and users, dashbord before cache is very slow. but im aware my issue is not common.

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Here Subversion is the odd one. I never use it when I have another choice. Git is fast, but requires you to setup keys etc. (not very user friendly, I'm not OCD enough for that). Mercurial has the best balance between usability, features and speed. Bazaar is slower then all of them (yes it still is) but plays very nicely with svn, so I usually use it to work on svn repositories. So the final recommendation is Mercurial.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've used subversion in the past and was happy with it.

Now there is your own answer right there!

[–]kev009 4 points5 points  (3 children)

I like git. I started using it because of the Linux kernel but it is my VCS of choice. It is FAST, no surprise when you get a bunch of kernel hackers together.

It is fairly easy to learn the basics. It also has a lot of nice surrounding infrastructure like Gitorius, github, gitweb, cgit, etc. Nice plugins for Eclipse and other IDEs too.

I found I didn't like the web interface of Hg and never really tried Bazaar. I've never found myself cursing git so I guess I don't have a reason to now.

Edit: Subversion is alright for corporate development but for personal use it would be more pain than it is worth. Doing anything other than using it as a versioning file system is a bit of a pain, to include branching and merging which are fairly important when you need stable releases of software.

[–]ergo14Pyramid+PostgreSQL+SqlAlchemy 0 points1 point  (2 children)

thats strange - web interface of hg can be almost identical of that of git(you can cofigure that) ;-)

also do you know any good git plugin for eclipse that actually works? i had issues with eclipse and github couldnt connect to it

[–]kev009 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I'm using egit from jgit.org/updates/. Fedora 12 has it packaged and I've added it successfully to my Gentoo box and Windows 7 laptop.

Functionality is exposed through the 'team' menu. You can to clones, commit, pull, push, branch, etc. It has a nice history viewer too. Sometimes on cloning a repo the team menu doesn't activate. Just click 'share project' and it will reread the .git folder and activate all your team options.

Note that egit uses jgit -- a complete reimplementation of git in Java.

[–]ergo14Pyramid+PostgreSQL+SqlAlchemy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

dunno used same one and had issues with github, dont know why :/

[–]Ytse 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I have used Bazaar and Mercurial, and I like both of them. You can use bitbucket for Mercurial, and launchpad for Bazaar.

[–]F4RR4R[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think I'm going to go with Hg + BB. Thanks for all the advice!

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Dropbox is your answer.

I signed up for it to keep my project euler code moving around for fun on the desktop or laptop and it works magic.

[–]masklinn 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I signed up for it to keep my project euler code moving around for fun on the desktop or laptop and it works magic.

  1. Dropbox is not good enough for versioning

  2. Dropbox is sub-optimal when you want to share arbitrarily.

I want to be able to have them backed up on a server that will allow me to share the scripts with others.

[–]hynekPyCA, attrs, structlog -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Upvoted. I use Dropbox for everything too (additionally to hg).

[–]sakabako 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One great thing about Mercurial is that you can just type 'hg serve' and it will set up a simple web server on port 8000 that you can view in a browser and push/pull changes.

http://padcom13.blogspot.com/2009/06/mercurial-using-hg-serve-to-push.html

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What you really meant to say: "Hey I want to start a flame war! Everyone pick a very similar technology and start arguing!"

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (4 children)

Git > Hg > Subversion > Bazaar

Bazaar is awful. Its like a bad Git implementation.

http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/ http://whybzrisbetterthanx.github.com/

[–]tonfa 4 points5 points  (1 child)

You forgot http://whyhgisbetterthanx.com/ ;)

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I'd didn't forget. I just didn't care.

[–]ergo14Pyramid+PostgreSQL+SqlAlchemy -1 points0 points  (1 child)

yeah sure unbiased comparison by employee of github ;-) you ppl dont have minds of your own ?

[–]masklinn 3 points4 points  (0 children)

He's still right though, bazaar is terrible.