Re: Prefer Mercurial instead of git

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> The UI issue is a red herring. You can work with Git from Emacs without
>> ever seeing git's UI, except perhaps for cloning the remote repo.
>
> Not entirely a red herring, because the Emacs front-ends only support
> a small fraction of the available commands.  A cursory look into
> vc-git.el indicates that it uses about 10% to 20% of the git
> commands.  Magit does better: 1/4th tgo 1/3rd, but still most of the
> commands are not supported.
>
> Granted, what the front-ends support are the most important and
> frequently used commands.  But the rest are still useful and need to
> be used from time to time, especially since they allow to do so much.
> Which means that one still needs to learn and understand the CLI
> syntax and the myriad of the options.

This "all-embracing" view is flawed for Git, is flawed for Emacs and is
flawed for a microwave oven. Furthermore, it is counterproductive.

The fact that some feature or command-line switch exists on git doesn't
mean that you "need to know it because it is useful". Supposing that
they are useful for *your use case*, it might not be time-effective to
learn and memorize that feature. I'm happily and efficaciously using git
from several years now and there are entire areas which are completely
unknown for me.

So mentioning the complexity of git when, in practice, you just need a
few minutes tutorial to use it with Magit and less than an hour for
adquiring a sound knowledge of its architecture (which allows a more
effective learning and usage), is a red herring, indeed.