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Comment by nonbirithm | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this. I was working on a project that was only available with Mercurial and I spent three days just trying to figure out how to not irreversibly corrupt my repo for a one-line change. I never figured it out and gave up since it wasn't super important.

I was happy when Atlassian finally sunset Mercurial, forcing those repositories to move to git. I'd rather all major source code hubs standardize on git since it's harder to contribute needing to learn different incompatible workflows.

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Corrupting your repo with a one-line change? Is there more to this story? A bug report, for example? It's not my experience of Mercurial at all.

Even if Mercurial is fine, Git is really good and is the standard in most cases. It's not worth confusing new hires with an alternative repo system when Git is this good, this common, and also happens to be FOSS.

The usual argument for Mercurial, though, is that it's easier to use and more resistant to getting the local repo into odd states than Git. That tends to make Mercurial a better option for people without significant Git background, and definitely makes bad user experiences of that sort with Mercurial interesting.

I guess what I'm getting at is that Mercurial supporters tend to view it as distinctly better than Git, so sticking to Git just because of its widespread usage does feel like a sort of defeat... One could say similar about Fossil, a much more ambitious project that has faltered probably mostly due to Git claiming all the mind share.

They will screw up their local branch exactly once in their life.

I'm smiling a bit as today I've been trying to un-corrupt a git repo where lfs files were treated as repo files and vice versa. "where's by multi-mb binary, replaced by an ascii pointer file". how can I resolve ssh and https? ugh.

I recommend using git-remote-hg when dealing with Mercurial repos. Or git-cinnabar for very large ones like Mozilla's.

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