Mercurial is probably that competitor. Only slightly slower than Git. Works on very large monorepos (as large as Facebook's or Google's monorepo). Very similar workflow as compared to Git, with some minor differences in terminology.
You can get around branching-is-bad by changing your workflows a bit, but you can't get around the bad merges: over time it's like death by a thousand papercuts.
As a Google employee I use hg every day, even though it's not required. (Some teams at Google do mandate its use, but these are few and far between.) I don't use branches, but I use bookmarks. I didn't notice any merges that really ought to be performed automatically but were not; in any case I use Meld to resolve merge conflicts and it's easy enough to do occasionally.
I'm also not certain that the "fundamental design issues" with git are truly fundamental to its design. For example, partial clones and sparse checkouts are seeing increasing support in recent versions of git — and those are really all you need.
What bothers you in particular?
If you want the wacky and unreliable git branching you can use hg bookmarks.
This page has been viewed 230 thousand (!!) times. Because git is so easy and elegant that it lies to you what branches exist on the remote.
It is not even funny any more how bad this is.
Normally mercurial stops when there are conflicts it cannot resolve reliably. In that cases, have a try at kdiff3: it handles hairy merges quite well. In a lot of cases even automatically (and correctly).
There is always meld, but I'd say kdiff3 is superior wrt merge conflict resolution.
Mercurial has 3 ways of doing branching:
- bookmarks: these are like git branches, a pointer to a revision
- branches: when you are in a branch, all commits are permanently affixed with that branch name. Less flexible than bookmarks (and therefore git branches) but good for traceability
- heads: unlike with git, a branch name can refer to several actual branches, it usually happens when you are pulling from a central repository, but you can create them yourself if you need some kind of anonymous branching. These can be pushed but it is not recommended.
Git only has the first option.
The way central repository are managed is also a bit different even if the fundamentals are the same. Git has the "origin" namespace to distinguish remote branches from local branches. Mercurial uses a "phase" which can be "public" (in remote), "private" (local only, will become "public" after a push) and "secret" (like "private", but will not be pushed and therefore will not become "public"). So if you are not synchronized with the remote, in git you will have two branches: origin/my_branch and my_branch, in mercurial, you will have two branches named my_branch, one public, one private. That's essentially the same thing, presented differently.
In the end, they are fundamentally the same. The feel is different though. Git is flexible, and gives you plenty of tools to keep things nice and clean when working with large, distributed project. As expected for something designed for the Linux kernel. Mercurial focuses on preserving history, including the history of your mistakes, and I feel it is better suited for managed teams than a loosely connected community.
* Pushing them is (slightly) more annoying than pushing git branches — you need a separate command, whereas `git push` just does the right thing by default * Deleting them doesn't delete the corresponding commits * There is only one global namespace shared across all remotes
That's interesting. In your examples isn't it fast because monorepos are network-based, as in, you only fetch what you need when you need it?
Also reminded me of discussions around CPython's startup time and how one use case where milliseconds matter is in small cli utilities such as Mercurial.
The entire repo is stored on a networked file system. So essentially every file operation is remote. That doesn't actually contribute to much slowness because when I didn't use hg, operations were noticeably faster.