Re: [Monotone-devel] results of mercurial user survey

[Georg-W. Koltermann]

Zbynek Winkler wrote:
> ...
>> "Monotone is simply too slow to use, even on smallish trees on my
>> dual amd64."
>
> That is probably THE reason why I switched from monotone to mercurial. I
> do not like the way mercurial stores all revision data in *each*
> workspace and "works around" this by using hardlinks or the way
> publishing remote branches works (ie. is more difficult than it needs to
> be) but I've learnt to live with it because it is reasonably fast and
> works over ssh (no new ports on firewalls needed, no new daemon
> listening for incoming connections etc.).
I think hg doesn't store everything in each workspace.  It depends on
what you ask of it at the time you clone (and later pull/push).  Do a
clone -r0 and you get just the tip.  Do a clone -U and you don't get the
checked out tree, i.e. you end up with just the history.

Hg really appeals to me.  Picking Hg or monotone mainly becomes a matter
of your preference for either a more star-like topology with a couple of
oligarchic interconnected repositories keeping all the history (well, to
the extent of their inter-netsyncing), or a fully p2p topology with all
the flexibility but also all the anarchy that it allows.  Basically with
the full p2p topology it is very easy to loose track of where your
history is and where it isn't.  And then suddenly when you remove one of
the peers you may easily loose a part of your history.  Which may be a
good thing if you were careful to merge the parts of history that you
want to keep to somewhere else beforehand, and thus you only loose the
parts that were more like sandboxish experimentation.  But it really
depends, you might as well loose valuable history if your merge flow was
not rigorous enough.

I assume Hg does not have that rigorous checking or even unit testing
that mtn has.  And, hey, they all borrow ideas from mtn anyway :-)

Just my $0.02 of course.  Correct me where I'm wrong.

--
Regards,
Georg.

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