For a long time Firefox Desktop development has supported both Mercurial and Git users. This dual SCM requirement places a significant burden on teams which are already stretched thin in parts. We have made the decision to move Firefox development to Git.

  • We will continue to use Bugzilla, moz-phab, Phabricator, and Lando
  • Although we’ll be hosting the repository on GitHub, our contribution workflow will remain unchanged and we will not be accepting Pull Requests at this time
  • We’re still working through the planning stages, but we’re expecting at least six months before the migration begins
You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments
35 points

I always preferred mercurial as a user but all the tooling and everything else built in the last decade has been for git so it makes sense.

permalink
report
reply
3 points

As someone who’s too young to have used anything but git, it’s kinda sad that it seems I’ll never get to use anything else

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Be the change you want to see. Start an open source project using mercurial. Host it somewhere here

https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/MercurialHosting

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Nothing in tech stands still. If you want a glimpse of a possible alternative future check out Pijul. And I don’t know an example off-hand but the idea of doing version control on ASTs of program code rather than flat text is an interesting concept that hasn’t taken off yet.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

Git seems to have reached a status of “good enough” to the point where it will probably stand still for quite a while. There just isn’t anything that offers benefit significant enough to justify the bother of switching (that I’ve seen so far, I’ve seen pijul before).

Plenty of things do stand still. We’re still stuck on qwerty keyboards for english.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

I forgot what it was but I used something else trust me you don’t want to use that.

It’s a rather unpopular idea on lemmy, but sometimes a monopoly is good thing. git having a monopoly in version control is a good thing

permalink
report
parent
reply

100% this. Git is defacto for good reasons. 😂 Feel free to try the others out though 👍

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

There are very good reasons why Git prevailed. The previous generation of SCMs were terrible. Most of the ones that came around the same time as Git (distributed SCMs) got lots of things wrong. Git is complex but it’s flexible, it doesn’t try to force any particular way of doing things on you, which means you can make it work with any flow you can think of.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points
*

Just find yourself an antiquated Microsoft aligned company and maybe you’ll get to taste the bitter fruit that is TFVC. I use it daily and it’s… Different.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

I miss using tfvc. Everything except for branching worked pretty well in visual studio.

Branching worked fine if you didnt have more than 2 or 3 too.

Sadly branches are pretty useful so git it is.

permalink
report
parent
reply
16 points

Mercurial had a nice UI on messy internals. Git had an initially not quite that nice UI on solid internals. It is obvious why Git won in the end.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

Gits UI is still terrible.

The reason it is popular is because it is the VCS of the Linux kernel and github became the defacto open source social media site.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

You have got that backwards. Github became popular because git was popular. Nobody forced people to use it and which VCS the Linux kernel uses barely matters to anyone not working on it.

The truth is that a “nice” UI that doesn’t allow you to know what actually happens because the internals are hard to understand is hard to trust with your code history that you still want to access 20 years later. Git is popular for the same reason Markdown, Textile,… are popular among programmers over WYSIWIG style rich text programs like Word.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Firefox

!firefox@lemmy.ml

Create post

A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox

Community stats

  • 1.8K

    Monthly active users

  • 887

    Posts

  • 17K

    Comments

Community moderators