Re: Repository conversion

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 9:13 PM, Tait wrote:
> "Eric S. Raymond" said (on 2014/02/24):
>> (2) Where do you want to land?
>>
>> As bzr is now moribund, the realistic alternatives are Subversion,
>> git, and hg.  But I mention Subversion only for completeness; the
>> advantages of distributed VCS are huge and if you're going to incur
>> the transition costs of moving away from CVS either git or hg would
>> have a much higher functional payoff.
>
> I'd not heard Bazaar was moribund... they seem to be still making new
> releases? (... However, SourceForge doesn't appear to support bzr, so
> it's probably moot to this discussion.)

While they might make new releases, the popularity lags way behind.
(And consequently there are way less tools and services supporting
it.) Also, Bazaar is not the only alternative, but all other tools
have even lower popularity and adoption. So yes, discussing anything
but those three doesn't seem worth it.

> Has anyone studied/published how many projects have switched from Hg
> to git, and vice-versa?

That's difficult enough, but you can feed the search engine with
"convert git mercurial" and figure out that just about every hit
explains how to convert from mercurial to git. The first hit about
conversion from git to mercurial was from the time when bitbucket was
the only provider of free hosting of private repositories and only
supported mercurial.

> From my personal anecdotal experience, I know
> of a couple that have hg->git (mostly due to difficulties with
> branching), but none that have git->hg.

... which confirms the above observation.

> Support for all three (#bzr, #mercurial, #git) can be had on
> irc.freenode.net. #Git is by far the largest channel of those (for
> whatever that's worth)

The "mean" explanation would be that git must be so difficult to use
that its users need most support ;)

> and seems to have the largest list of projects
> using it, so momentum seems to favor git there.

Here are some numbers, showing about three times more git users than
those of mercurial:

http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/devprod-report-revisited-version-control-systems-in-2013/
http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=subversion+git+mercurial+bazaar&show_installed=on&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date&to_date&hlght_date&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m
http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/BzrPopularity
http://bazaarvcs.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/bazaar-adoption-growing-strongly/
    (they stopped writing the blog in 2012)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/995636/popularity-of-git-mercurial-bazaar-vs-which-to-recommend
    latest counting of tags on stackoverflow – git: 37547, mercurial: 5878

(In the spirit of the same argument as above about BitBucket driving
the git->hg conversion, I would dare to claim that GitHub contributed
a lot towards the high popularity of git.)

Anyway, whatever tool (out of the three) would be chosen ... it would
be a lot better than CVS.

Mojca