FUD

Factual Errors in “Git vs Mercurial: Why Git?” -- and corrections shown by example

Update 2016: Instead of fixing the article, the Atlassian web workers removed the comments which point out the misinformation in the article. *sigh*

Summary:

In the Atlassian Blog, a Git proponent spread blatant misinformation which the Atlassian folks are leaving uncommented even though the falseness has been shown by multiple people and even in examples in the article itself.

The claims and corrections:

  • Claim: Git never loses unreferenced data. Mercurial needs special handling to retrieve unreferenced data. Reality: Due to automatic garbage collection, history editing in git unpredictably loses unreferenced history while Mercurial stores permanent backups which can be retrieved with core commands.
  • Claim: Only git branches are namespaced. Reality: Mercurial bookmarks are namespaced with bookmark@path, when there could be confusion. This is equivalent to git’s use of path/branch, but only used where it is needed, while git forces the user to always make that distinction.
  • Claim: Only git can provide a staging area. Reality: Activating mercurial queues (mq) and the record extension provides a staging area like the git index — for those who want it.
  • Claim: Git is more powerful. Reality: Both have the same raw power (as proven by transparent access with Mercurial to Git repos via hg-git), but
  • its “cuddly command line” gives Mercurial an efficiency during actual usage which most people do not find in Git.

2 years ago, Atlassian developer Charles O’Farrell published the article Git vs. Mercurial: Why Git? in which he claimed to show "the winning side of Git”. This article was part of the Dev Tools series at Atlassian and written as a reply to the article Why Mercurial?. It was spiced with so much misinformation about Mercurial (statements which were factually wrong) that the comments exploded right away. But the article was never corrected. Just now I was referred to the text again, and I decided to do what I should have done 2 years ago: Write an answer which debunks the myths.

“I also think that git isn’t the most beginner-friendly program. That’s why I’m only using its elementary features” — “I hear that from many git-users …” — part of the discussion which got me to write this article

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