Mozilla Firefox Development Finally Moving Entirely To Git

[ferry]

...

Almost all software engineers I'm working with are kinda 'forced' to use git. They suffer a lot of pain, and mostly fail using it : they keep on removing their fubared clones and clone again. They keep copies of their uncommited stuff in case git get in their way, again. They avoid anything fancy like stash/clone/merges or handling several branches like hell. The same for sysadmin.

..

I gotta say: all these these experienced programmers crying like babies on how difficult git is to use? Really?

As am amateur I find it almost unbelievable how well it works, especially when collaborating and merging other peoples stuff. I did find that it helps if you keep to certain workflows, like working on only one issue per branch, fortunately it is quick and easy to create new branches. And before merging rebase and then merge with --no-ff.

And to keep an overview of patches and branches you need some gui. I prefer qgit with it's limited functionality over gitk (indeed lots of voodoo in there).

Most importantly, any voodoo you might really need at a certain point is just one google search away.

[caligula]

It's far easier. git is (probably, i hope for them) good for kernel development and Linus way of handling things. But for the rest of us, mercurial is a lot easier. They indeed arrived around the same time, for the same reason (Linus ditching bitkeeper).

At this time, I spent one whole day trying to mess with git painfully, while it took me 5 minutes (hg --help) to be used to mercurial. Granted I was a regular user of previous systems (cvs, subversion, svk).
Years later, git is still extremely difficult to use, even for seasoned users. I use mostly git, i'm a consultant, my clients obviously use that. But when i can, it's mercurial.

Git used to be much crappier. The user interface was a collection of scripts and there was poor library support. Some say the Windows support was also bad, especially without the aforementioned library support and without good command line interface (wsl came much later). The output of many commands has also improved quite a bit. These days I'd say git is providing much better instructions for the user. Especially good for novies. In recent years many development tools have also improved their git support. You can use it with any IDE.

I started with RCS like almost three decades ago, switched to CVS, then SVN. I used SVN for quite many years, probably 7 or so. It had great integration with Edgewall Trac. I started concurrently using Mercurial for some projects. Used it for several years as well. Fully switched to Git in 2018 or so. So I've plenty of knowledge and experience of all these.

One aspect nobody mentioned is that Mercurial is f*cking slow. It becomes obvious with larger repositories. I usually don't switch just because something is more popular, but the multitude of hosting options, decent command line experience, and superior performance means it's just the reasonable way to go these days.

[ssokolow]

One aspect nobody mentioned is that Mercurial is f*cking slow. It becomes obvious with larger repositories. I usually don't switch just because something is more popular, but the multitude of hosting options, decent command line experience, and superior performance means it's just the reasonable way to go these days.

I knew Torvalds had explicitly designed git based on setting himself a sub-second deadline for all non fetch/push/pull commands to complete in (I think it was 100ms. He did a talk where he went into the psychological and workflow benefits of not settling for just being sub-second.) and I heard about them working to oxidize Mercurial, but, since I bounced off Mercurial, I didn't know how slow it was.

[Anvil]

GIT is BAD, Microsoft OWNS IT

[mercster]

GIT is BAD, Microsoft OWNS IT

Oh be quiet.

[CommunityMember]

Doing anything in git is typing in dark magic voodoo incantations.

I am sure it seems that way to some. For experienced developers, and especially those with large distributed community, git is second nature and makes everything easier.

Mozilla has a large engineering staff who are experienced, so git is the right choice moving forward (even as the final steps in the migration will end up in 2024).

[mercster]

I used CVS extensively decades ago; I had a job once where a large part of my duties was maintaining a CVS repository. And yeah, I can't wrap my head around git. I could probably figure it out if I really buckled down, but I don't NEED to work with it, but... yeah. I think it's just about having a certain source control paradigm in your head, which git does not follow and is confusing. I won't shit on it though, since it's my deficit; obviously git is grokable since many people use it successfully.

[orzel]

GIT is BAD, Microsoft OWNS IT

Nope, ms owns github, which is a different story.

[ElectricPrism]

So git was authored by Linus Torvalds and Microsoft owns it because they bought GitHub. False Equivilancy, yeah whatever.

Breaking News: Launchpad Bazaar is looking for Admin

I know you /s but if Launchpad went bust I would be much more interested in software that previously used to host there. I find them uncompetitive, and out dated, like how the Debian website was godawful for maybe 20 years before they got around to getting rid of the warts.

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Main topic,

Gabriele Svelto @[email protected] @andy47 I've grown fond of Mercurial over time, and I prefer its workflow to Git's. However I agree with what the post states rather bluntly: we don't have the resources to handle both, and we can't get away from Git because we have far more projects using it overall

Too bad some of that Mozilla CEO money couldn't be "resources" to maintain it. Everyone knows how middle and upper management needs their cheq's more than the slackerhacker /s ;P

In all seriousness, Mozilla needs to modernize, and while a step in the right direction, they are a fat awkward behemoth like spruce goose, and while it's not surprising that they are clinging to last-decade tools like Bugzilla, I'm sure it will really hold them back when it comes to competing with Chrome. (assuming they even are as Big Daddy G is their main income)

To Bugzilla and Mozilla's credit it looks like they have done a decent job at making it not look like a 90s solaris tech dungeon ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ ) but I will always bemoan how piss poor the attachment settings have been across all the ones I've participated in -- uploading images and other relevant content has been abysmal when compared to GitLab/GitHub or other modern triage systems.

I probably triggered some of you with such controversial yet plainly observable, so if you're piping hot I'll grab my popcorn if you want to make a WorksForMeTM arguments common to this forum. ( Reading the internet by piping the web browser to my printer WorksForMeTM XD)

[Veerappan]

Having migrated from mercurial to git at work a while back (and having previous experience with CVS, Subversion, and RCS), I'd say it was a pretty easy transition for our shop.

There's a few differences that matter (mercurial branches are permanent, git branches are ephemeral... And then the whole ambiguity between the 'default' branch and 'default' commit versus main/HEAD), but otherwise the two are pretty interchangeable.

The biggest differences are that git has a larger community and better IDE support, which means I don't have to spend a few weeks mentoring new hires on how git works since there's a good chance they know it already. Mercurial definitely took time to get people up to speed.