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Comment by anton_gogolev | Hacker News Reader

And again, no Mercurial. Have we lost?

Hg seems to have lost the SCM war (of popularity) unfortunately - i quite like hg.

Same here.

I think if it was not for the convoluted Revlog [1] format (which makes it impossible to do a clean-room reimplementation of Mercurial Core), we could see a bit more of adoption by having third-party libraries to interface with Hg repositories. It _might_ have been one of the reasons Git, not Mercurial, was added to TFS [2].

1: https://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/RevlogNG

2: https://hglabhq.com/blog/2014/1/17/mercurial-support-in-tfs-...

>if it was not for the convoluted Revlog [1] format (which makes it impossible to do a clean-room reimplementation of Mercurial Core), we could see a bit more of adoption

Alternatively, we could see a bit more adoption if it were available under a more permissive license than the GPL.

Git is also under GPL, so I am not sure how much of an argument that is.

You can theoretically reimplement Git Core by only referencing the documentation, which, according to some sources, does not "infect" the new code with GPL.

could you not have replaced git with hg above, and the argument still holds? Revlog's format itself isn't under copyright (and i doubt it exists, but only with a patent can you stop a _format_ spec from being used). If you wrote a parser for the revlog format, you aren't "infected".

Also, hg plugins are much easier to write (being in python and all), than messing around with git's internals imho (ala, facebook's modification to hg to make it massively scalable https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc..., which would've been almost impossible in git).

It's not realistically possible to write a Revlog parser by only using whatever documentation is available; you _will_ have to reference the Hg source code, which will turn your project into "derived work".

This is a shame since Mercurial is so much better than Git. Git is downright painful in comparison.

It's actually discouraging to see so many developers choose to work with something so problematic as Git, to be blunt.

My question is how long is GitHub will remain a git-only platform?

It seems only natural to me that they should branch out. (heh... branch)

Having invested so much into Git-oriented projects and whatnot, I think they will remain Git-only till the heat death of the universe.

And then again, Hg repositories on _Git_ Hub?

Hey, Rap Genius bought genius.com! :)

Unless one day they rebrand their name like "genius" did, maybe codehub or something.

I think it's incredibly unlikely Github will ever support another SCM, unless a new one becomes available which all the devs switch to.

They've supported Subversion for a few years now: https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...

They (kinda) support subversion already.

https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...

I'm afraid so. :(

I tried using Mercurial on Kiln for private, personal projects. When I wanted some of those to graduate to public, GitHub projects it was a pain in the ass. So I switched to Git for all Kiln projects. And Kiln even has either/or magic.

Damn.

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