Comments on: More on Git, Mercurial, and Bzr

By: me

me — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:34:09 +0000

I think the formula you wanted is

git format-patch $(git rev-list HEAD | tail -1)

By: Lee

Lee — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:45:54 +0000

One of the things that makes me keep choosing KDE over GNOME is what was once said of KDE — that it’s a “desktop for grown-ups”. i.e., it’s not about having the latest cool color scheme or transparent terminals (except in the incomplete 4.0 release)… instead, it’s practical, useful, boring for the most part. But it gets work done. Quickly. When it comes to features, most of them are the intuitive things you HOPE your desktop will do when you’re actually using it and try something thinking, “you know, it’d really save me some hassle if I could just drag this here and the desktop knew what I wanted” or things like that.

For me, bzr is the same. It’s not exciting. It’s practical and predicatable. It’s version control for grown-ups who don’t care about quilts and storage methods, but DO need powerful features to just work so they can get things done.

By: rupert thurner

rupert thurner — Sat, 26 May 2007 14:32:22 +0000

every powerful tool has to be complicated? i always find it very challenging to make a tool simple to use.

hg, and git are not examples of much brainwork in simplicity. while darcs is imo.

By: Jakub Narebski

Jakub Narebski — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 12:52:10 +0000

I come from git camp, so please forgive me my bias.

WRT documentation, I think it is getting better. Nevertheless documentation looks like written by developers and experienced users, who _know_ where to find everything.

To export current branch as series of patches I would use (assuming that branch is based on ‘master’ branch, and we are on given branch) “git format-patch -n master..HEAD” (meaning: everything in current branch that is not [available from] master).

As to “darcs send” equivalent… in my opinion it is better to separate the ‘bundle’ generation from actual transport. Git has from almost the beginning git-format-patch and git-send-email / git-imap-send to send patches (for review), and lately it has git-bundle for disconnected replication (sneakernet, email).

As to being overly complicated: every powerfull tool has to be complicated.

I find ideas behind git very sound and clear (ideas of branches, tags, commit objects).

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 14:46:49 +0000

Git has a git-bundle command that does the same thing. Although it’s not limited to email, you can use it for any method of disconnected replication (cd/dvd/email etc).

By: michael

michael — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 07:28:34 +0000

Bzr’s bundles are actually far superior to anything git does. You can email a bundle and it’s exactly equivalent to someone doing a merge from your repo, all metadata is included etc.

By: Ted's Blog

Ted's Blog — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 16:52:41 +0000

John Goerzen recently posted about Git, Mercurial and Bzr that I found interesting, especially since I used to be in the hg camp, but have been gradually using git more and more, even to the point making minor improvements to the git documentation and writing the git mergetool, since being able to automatically fire up a graphical merge tool was one of the features which I missed from hg. So while I haven’t yet converted the primary SCM repository for e2fsprogs to use git (yet), I’ve reached an opposite concolusion from John, and yet, I can’t really argue with his observations.

The main reason why I’ve come out in favor of git is that I see its potential as being greater than hg, and so while it definitely has some ease-of-use and documentation shortcomings, in the long run I think it has “more legs” than hg,

By: Andres Salomon

Andres Salomon — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 07:17:32 +0000

Yes, the version of bzr in sid is pretty old; I uploaded it back in Oct. However, it’s not *that* old; bzr only recently added support for tags.

0.14 is in experimental, if you’d prefer to use something more up-to-date. Personally, I use git all of the time now. The interface infuriates me (and they just changed the branching interface and actually made it *harder* to use), but it’s quick, can handle kernel-sized trees, and gets the job done without causing my laptop to fall over.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:45:53 +0000

Nope, that generates no output at all.

See what I mean? ;-)

By: sbalneav

sbalneav — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:38:01 +0000

> 0.15 is not released. I would not want to use some sort of development branch in production.

> I am running the latest version in Debian sid.

Please tell me you’re joking.
Please.

I beg of you.

Scott Balneaves

By: Jan Hudec

Jan Hudec — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 08:03:47 +0000

The bzr version in [b]sid[/b] is simply [b]ancient[/b] — latest release is 0.14 while sid still has 0.11. Bzr homepage will have more recent .deb.

Bzr 0.15 is currently release candidate, so it should be out in few days.

I have to say though, that while I used bzr for some time, I ended up liking the way git does branching and taggin more than the bzr way, though the bzr way is easier to learn.

By: Travis

Travis — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 18:08:53 +0000

I think you wanted ‘git format-patch master’

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 16:30:14 +0000

I can’t also decide between git and hg, and I am also looking at every new bzr release, because I am very excited about that as well.

But I think the Mercurial Folks are way ahead and so is hg.

Interesting articles though.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:20:23 +0000

0.15 is not released. I would not want to use some sort of development branch in production.

I am running the latest version in Debian sid.

$ bzr help topics
bzr: ERROR: unknown command “topics”

Nothing in the bundle-revisions command actually emails anything. This would leave it to an extra step, which was exactly my point. bzr doesn’t email anything. The mere fact that it generates an object that I *could* email is not my gripe. My gripe is that emailing isn’t integrated.

So, I stand by my comments. If bzr develops more features in future releases, I can look at it again then.

By: Martijn

Martijn — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:02:33 +0000

bzr does support tagging now; it’s in version 0.15. It also supports creating emailable patches with meta-data (called ‘bundles’ — see the ‘bundle-revisions’ command).

Also, ‘bzr help topics’ works fine for me, giving a list of help topics available (bzr help gives me more on the selected topic).

Please research properly, before bashing a product.