Do I know anyone using Mercurial for decent-size professional dev teams?

[calcifer@masto.hackers.town]

Do I know anyone using Mercurial for decent-size professional dev teams? I’m being asked to evaluate a proposal for switching and I’d like to hear from a couple people who aren’t selling something and can give a sober account of where it’s good and where it struggles in the real world.

[tek@freeradical.zone]

@calcifer Switching from what, exactly? From Subversion? Yes, absolutely, do that ASAP. From Git? No way. Mercurial is fine, and I'm sure it has some things it does better than Git. But you're going to be in for a world of pain everywhere else. GitHub and GitLab and Forgejo don't support it. No common tools support it nearly so well as they do Git. Your devs *will* have to use Git sometimes to manage 3rd-party deps. 99% of your devs will hate having to learn a non-Git VCS.

I wouldn't do it.

[calcifer@masto.hackers.town]

@tek we have an amalgam of different systems (some open and others not) and the CTO wants to unify everyone. There’s a big git camp and a small but influential hg camp, and I’m being asked basically to bring some sanity to the conversation.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@calcifer @tek I would highly recommend git, TBH. For a competent opinion on hg (in preference to git) maybe @mcc wants to chime in.

[calcifer@masto.hackers.town]

I appreciate everyone who replied; based on your feedback (and others elsewhere), I’m probably going to make the focus of my assessment the overall ecosystem rather than the technical merits.

As in “hg has some cool features but it doesn’t matter because broad support for git has so much value”.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@calcifer interestingly there are parts of git that suffer from a similar issue (ecosystem support). For example, “large files” are a notoriously hard problem in git, and the most common solution is git-lfs (because it's what GH supports), even though arguably git-annex is superior.