this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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Mercurial does have a few things going for it, though for most use-cases it's behind Git in almost all metrics.
I really do like the fact that it keeps a commit number counter, it's a lot easier to know if "commit 405572" is newer than "commit 405488" after all, instead of Git's "commit ea43f56" vs "commit ab446f1". (Though Git does have the describe format, which helps somewhat in this regard. E.g. "0.95b-4204-g1e97859fb" being the 4204th commit after tag 0.95b)
I suspect rebasing makes sequential commit IDs not really work in practice.
Rebasing updates the commit ids. It's fine. Commit IDs are only local anyway.
One thing that makes mercurial better for rebase based flows is obsolescence markers. The old version of the commits still exist after a rebases and are marked as being made obsolete by the new commits. This means somebody you've shared those old commits with isn't left in hyperspace when they fetch your new commits. There's history about what happened being shared.
Whay do you mean by that?
You and I both clone a repo with ten changes in it. We each make a new commit. Both systems will call it commit 11. If I pull your change into my repo your 11 becomes my 12.
The sequential change IDs are only consistent locally.
Got it! Are they renumbered chronologically? Like if my 11 was created before your 11, would yours be the one that's renumbered?
No. They are not renumbered. Your 11 is always the same commit. It's consistent locally (which is what I mean by "local only") otherwise they'd change under your feet. You just can't share them with others and expect the same results. You have to use the hash for that.
That's exactly the same in
git. The old commits are still there, they just don't show up ingit logbecause nothing points to them.Old, unreachable commits will be garbage collected.
Does that not happen with Mercurial? If not that seems like a point against it.
I'm confused, the behavior you just said was "exactly the same in git" is now a problem for Mercurial?
I thought it was exactly the same based on the description.
No the old commit is always there, marked as obsolete with the information of what it became. No holes in history. (Assuming you use the obsolecense markers)