Programming

I've been writing about Git a bit lately.

I've decided to switch some of my Debian work over to it to start with, as well as some of my other projects.

Although I was thoroughly frustrated with Git a year ago, now I am quite pleased with it. What's different? The documentation is a LOT better. So far I have only found one manpage (git-show) that omits lots of its options. The system is friendlier, keystroke-happier, and powerful.

Compared to Mercurial, I've found some nice things:

In-directory branching. I didn't expect to care about this, since both git and hg permit lightweight clones. But it turns out to be so easy to use that it is great. Especially since I don't have to setup multiple branch repos on the server. I really like this. Note that "hg branch" is not the same as a git branch, and see the discussion on the hg lists about renaming that before 1.0.0 for why.

Flexibility in getting things around. Plain HTTP works fine (no static-http:// hack). ssh. git daemon. rsync. Very slick.

Performance. Surprisingly, git actually feels faster than Mercurial, especially when pushing or pulling. I didn't expect that.

Tags. They seem smarter in git. No more merging of .hgtags all the time. Also I like that I can attach a message to a tag and sign it.

All that power. There is a *lot* that Git can do. I should have been taking notes about it all.

My main complaint is still that Git doesn't have something as nice as "darcs send". Mercurial doesn't either, but it's a bit closer. Git has moved closer, but still has room to improve on that.

So I have set up git.complete.org and am starting to publish my Debian stuff on Debian's alioth server as well.

Also, hg-fast-export in the fast-export project is *awesome*. Branch-aware and everything. It made a perfect Git version of my Mercurial work.