On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 9:54 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

Yeah, I also think I'll just stop developing Python now and suggest that you all switch to Java, which has clearly won the mindshare war for languages. :-)

Heh. :-) Guess I should have said "mindshare among people whose technical opinions I give weight to". In that sense, Python mindshare seems to have been and to still be increasing steadily. (My Magic 8-ball says "future unclear" for Java.) The TIOBE index is entertaining, if you haven't seen it before: http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

But is his humility enough to cancel out Linus's attitude?

Why would I want to do that? :-) Seriously--thanks for all of your responses. If it wasn't clear, I was asking because I was curious about whether and why I should look some more at hg. I would never dream of trying to change anyone's mind... Mike

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Mike Coleman wrote:

It looks like there might be a Python clone sprouting here:

   http://gitorious.org/projects/git-python/

AFAIK, git-python is just a lib to manipulate git repos from python, not a git clone. Dulwich is more like it: http://samba.org/~jelmer/dulwich/ -- Eduardo de Oliveira Padoan http://importskynet.blogspot.com http://djangopeople.net/edcrypt/ "Distrust those in whom the desire to punish is strong." -- Goethe, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

I also just wrote a long post about the comparison of bzr to hg responding to a comment on bazaar@canonical.com. I won't recap it here but it might be of interest.

Thank you very much for your writeups on that thread: both in tone and in content I found them extremely helpful. Tres. - -- =================================================================== Tres Seaver +1 540-429-0999 tseaver@palladion.com Palladion Software "Excellence by Design" http://palladion.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFJ0riB+gerLs4ltQ4RAir2AJ4rXedI4gfkaZxP5LRiOSonAI/csQCgqkpb CY6QHmE8VHpGYGaENeUMnXQ= =t/1R -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

2009/3/31 Alex Martelli :

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 5:42 PM, Tres Seaver wrote:

...

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

...

I also just wrote a long post about the comparison of bzr to hg responding to a comment on bazaar@canonical.com.  I won't recap it here but it might be of interest.

Thank you very much for your writeups on that thread:  both in tone and in content I found them extremely helpful.

I'd like to read that thread for my edification -- might there be a URL for it perhaps...?

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2009q1/055850.html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2009q1/055872.html -- Alexandre

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 6:33 PM, Alexandre Vassalotti

wrote: ...

html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2009q1/055850.html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2009q1/055872.html

Perfect, thanks! Alex

2009/4/1 Tres Seaver :

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

...

I also just wrote a long post about the comparison of bzr to hg responding to a comment on bazaar@canonical.com.  I won't recap it here but it might be of interest.

Thank you very much for your writeups on that thread:  both in tone and in content I found them extremely helpful.

Agreed. Paul

2009/3/31 Nick Coghlan

Mike Coleman wrote:

...

Just for curiosity's sake, could someone outline the five (or so) most significant pluses of hg relative to git?

Every single git command line example I have seen gives me exactly the same gut reaction I get whenever I have to read Perl code. You can extol the tool's virtues to me all day long, but you're never going to eliminate that visceral horror at its interface, any more than someone that loves Perl is going to have any luck convincing me that it really can be a sane choice of language for anything more than write-once-read-never throwaway scripts.

Note that it *isn't* the idea of a using a directed acyclic graph in general that bothers me (since all DVCSs are pretty much forced to do that): it's specifically the way the sensibilities of git's original audience are reflected in the CLI, and the subsequent offense to my own personal sense of aesthetics :)

The Mercurial and Bazaar interfaces on the other hand, both seemed perfectly palatable (e.g. a bit more inclined to use words over arcane symbols), and Hg appears to be a clear winner against Bazaar when it comes to performance *right now*. So Guido's intuition actually sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

It's also about what the community prefers. Git was eliminated because it didn't offer some stellar feature that warranted forcing core developers to use it when my little survey clearly showed it was the most disliked. Hg was chosen (in my view) because the community wanted it; after I said Git was out I had a lot of people come up to me stating their preference for Mercurial. Once again, while Bazaar would have been fine, there was not leaping out at me to cause me to think that I should potentially alienate part of the community by going against their preference. -Brett

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

Nick Coghlan writes:

...

Every single git command line example I have seen gives me exactly the same gut reaction I get whenever I have to read Perl code.

Every single one? Sounds to me like the cause is probably something you ate, not anything you read. In the examples in the PEP, about 80% of the commands were syntactically identical across VCSes.

What, hyperbole on the internets? ;) The non-trivial examples are the ones I was talking about - as you say, for trivial tasks, the only difference is typically going to be in the exact name of the command.

I hope nobody is put off either git or bzr by the result of this PEP. If there's anything striking about the PEP's examples, it's how similar the usage of the VCSes would be in the context of Python's workflow. There are important differences, and I agree with Guido's choice, for Python, on March 30, 2009. But all three are capable VCSes, with advantages and disadvantages, and were this PEP started next June rather than last December, the result could have been very different.

Indeed! (although I doubt git's CLI will ever evolve into anything I could claim to love) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------