Mercurial vs Git

Not long ago I found myself developing an application in which I was adding new features and changes frecuently. At that time I did not use any version control tool so the only thing I did was to backup into a separate directory. Finally, the number of backups was so great that it was not operative. It was hard to know what was done in each version so the usefulness of that method was reduced to using the last backup disaster. I realized it was time to learn to use a version control tool. It was an idea that had been in my mind for some time but I had discarded by saying the effort was not worth for the size and complexity of my personal projects. However, in the end I made a step forward.

I started examining the existing options. I did not want to marry me with any choice but to decide which was more appropriate to learn to use a version control tool. In the future I'm open to use another tool if need arises.

Although I've seen Subversion in corporate environments, I chose to investigate other popular choices between independent developers. Launchpad, the infrastructure built by Canonical to host open source projects uses Bazaar, but I've read bad reviews about it was getting old and is too related to projects focused on Ubuntu. As my project does not necessarily focus on Ubuntu I decided to discard Bazaar for now. The following two options were Mercurial and Git.

Chosing between Mercurial and Git is far from being easy from. Internet is full of controversy about which one is better. The truth is that there are many arguments in favor of both of them. These two are very powerful tools you should know since depending on the situation one can be more suitable than the other. Actually their origin is very similar, some time ago the working group that developed the Linux kernel decided to write his own version control tool. They opened two ways of development, one led by Linus Torvalds who developed Git using C, Bash and Perl, the other way was led by Matt Mackall who Mercurial with C and Python. In the end we they Git in part because its development ended a few days before and partly, evil tongues say, because it was Linus work.

In a rather funny blog I found an analogy that was written in 2008 but seems to apply still: Git is like MacGyver while Mercurial is like James Bond.

Before someone falls in shock I will explain last lines. Git follows Unix approach of specializing executables in particular tasks, so that complex tasks are performed by combining the individual executables. In acordance installing Git involves the installation of over 100 specialized small executables. This increases the difficulty of learning Git but exponentially increases its flexibility allowing it to be configured to support the most complex workflows development that we might have. This approach of combining simple elements to get more powerful systems is what makes Git the MacGyver of the version control tools. As we said, a project that is making active use of  Git in its development is the Linux kernel.

Mercurial is however much easier. It just installs an executable which is used in every situation with different arguments. This simplicity greatly benefits to learn it and, in fact, it is said that those who know Subversion have really easy to learn Mercurial because the main commands are very similar. It is easy to realize that Mercurial is pretty intuitive and clean. In the end, 80% of the time you use just a few commands in everyday jobs with Mercurial. Faced with the flexibility of Git, Mercurial offers simplicity. Mercurial is like James Bond because if you use it in the right situation it will be able to solve it smartly and yet it will let you plenty of time to drink a martini with vodka ;-) . However, this simplicity does not mean that Mercurial lacks power, large projects of the free community use it. For example, it is used by the very development team of Python. Many projects of the Mozilla Foundation use it too. Actually, for some reason the general trend is that Python developers prefer Mercurial, perhaps because it is closer to the Zen of Python when it says : "Simple is better than complex"

If you work on a project where the development model is complex because it involves many people and many work fronts maybe it would make sense to choose Git. However, if the organization of the development of our project is simple as Mercurial probably will allow you to move more quickly and effectively.

Another element to assess is the support that is given to each version control tool when uploading to the cloud our repositories to facilitate collaborative work. For Bazaar , the iconic place to upload projects is Launchpad. Problem is that, as we said, Launchpad is exclusively focused on Ubuntu projects.

For Git, the most famous place to upload our repository is GitHub, which has received a tremendous popularity in part thanks to its interesting social features to make very easy to share code with others. Their price plan charge per private repositories. Up to 5 private repositories we pay up to $7 a month. However, we can have all the public repositories we want and with unlimited collaborators (people with write access to the repository). Thats why projects like Django have chosen GitHub as their public GitHub repository.

For Mercurial, the reference site is BitBucket. Unlike GitHub they have support for both Mercurial and Git. Their functionality is similar to GitHub although the latter do have more followers. However, their pricing plan is different from GitHub because BitBucket charge the number of collaborators so that below 5 we can have all repositories we want for free, both public and private. That makes BitBucket especially interesting for developers who make many solo projects. Two example projects that use BitBucket are Sphinx and PyPi (see previous article) .

From what I 've seen out there, many developers admit to use both portals: they have their personal developments in BitBucket and when they want to make a public one and open it to the collaboration of the community they rely on GitHub .

In my case, my developments are small and private so I'm going to start using Mercurial and BitBucket. That way I will be able to familiarize myself with the typical version control procedures. In the future we'll see if it is worth learning Git (and GitHub).