In the summer of 2007, I switched some of my personal coding projects from the Subversion version control system to git.
Git was especially appealing because the network of computers I regularly worked on was quite flat. I did some work on laptops and some on desktops at home and in the office, but for projects like these I didn’t have an always-on central server that I could rely on pushing to, as one really needs to have with Subversion.
So even though I was working alone, I was eager for a distributed, peer-to-peer process: commit, commit, commit on one machine; push to the other machine or a temporary staging post online; pick up later when I’m at the keyboard of the other machine.
Git wasn’t the first distributed version control system I’d had installed—that would be darcs—but it was the first that looked like it might have a popular future, and the first one I was excited about being able to use.
My excitement lasted about a week, and then I lost some code.
I lost it quite hard: I knew I’d written it, I knew I’d committed it, and I knew I’d pushed it somewhere other than the machine I’d written it on, although I couldn’t remember which machine that had originally been. But I couldn’t find it anywhere.
It wasn’t visible on the machine I’d pushed it to, and I couldn’t find it on any of the machines I might have pushed from. In fact, I never did find it. I’d managed to get my code enfolded into the system so that I could no longer get back to where I’d left it. I didn’t know anyone else who used git at the time, to ask for help. I’d fallen for a program that was cleverer than me and that wasn’t afraid to show it.
And as a long-time user of centralised version control systems, the idea of losing code after you checked it in was really a bit shocking. That shouldn’t ever happen, no matter how dumb you are.
So I went back to Subversion. Technically-better is not always better.
The reason for my confusion was that in my excitement I’d been imagining I could freely do peer-to-peer pushes and end up with the same repository state at both ends—something any fool could tell you is just not the way it works. (I probably lost the code by doing a push to a bare repository, something that is now harder to do by accident.)
As it happens, though, the way I had imagined it would work… is the way it works with Mercurial.
So when I found Mercurial I became happy again, and I’ve been happily using that ever since. Of course git has become so popular that you can’t really avoid it, and I know it well enough now that I wouldn’t make those mistakes again. Still, how much happier to use a system that actually does work the way you expect it to.
The Breakfast Post 