[Python-Dev] PEP 481 - Migrate Some Supporting Repositories to Git and Github

[Donald Stufft]

> On Nov 30, 2014, at 10:08 PM, Pierre-Yves David <pierre-yves.david at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 11/29/2014 06:01 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
>> The reason the PEP primarily focuses on the popularity of the the tool is
>> because as you mentioned, issues like poor documentation, bad support for a
>> particular platform, a particular workflow not being very good can be
>> solved by working with the tool authors to solve that particular problem. I wouldn’t
>> consider those issues in a vacuum to be a good reason to migrate away from that
>> tool.
> 
> As I understand it[1] my current employer (Facebook) picked Mercurial over git because these very reason end up being important. And this analysis have been validated by another big company[2].
> 
> Git implementation is very tied to the linux world and this slowed down its gain of a windows support. This is not something that will change by discussing with author: "btw can you rewrite your tool with different techno and concept?".
> Mercurial is extensible in Python, very extensible. In my previous job one of our client switched to Mercurial and was able to get an extension adding commands to match it exact previous code-review workflow in a couple of hundred line of python. (you could have the same for python).
> Mercurial developer are already connected to the Python community. They are invited to language submit, regular pycon speaker and attendees etc.
> 
> All these things contradict "bah any project would not make a difference"
> 
>> However there’s very little that CPython can do to get more people using
>> Mercurial, and presumably the authors of Mercurial are already doing  what they
>> can to get people to use them.
> 
> Mercurial is an open source project. We have no communication department, no communication budget actually. Over the year, more and more contributors are actually paid to do so, but they usually focus on "making employer's users" happy. Something that rarely involves getting more outside-world users. We mostly rely on the network effect to gain more users, (yes, we are losing to git on this, but still growing anyway). Part of this network effect is having big project like CPython using Mercurial. It also imply that CPython dev are willing to look at how the tools works and that the Project tries to take advantage of the tools strength. This would turn the situation into mutual benefits. You are happy with Mercurial and we are happy with Python.
> 
> However moving to git and github send a very different signal: If you want to be a successful command line tool, use C and bash. If you want to be a successful website use ruby on rails.

I want to adress this point specifically, because it’s not particularly related to the hg vs git discussion that Guido has asked people to stop doing.

The idea that unless Python as a project always picks something written in Python over something written in something else we’re somehow signaling to the world that if you want to write X kind of tool you should do it in some other language is laughable. It completely ignores anything at all about the tools except what language they are written in.