Git and Mercurial Branching

People using my stuff will have noticed a trend that I started using git (and github) for some of my newer projects. Now there are two parts of the story. One is obviously github which is currently unbeatable. Not necessarily due to the size of the community but that it gives you a very neat way to look at what patches are available all over the place (I'm referring to the fork queue). But the other reason is that despite all the hate for git I have, it has grown on me as the tool that does the job better.

This however is a shame because if you remove the github component and some other addons like the hub command, hg is the superior tool. If you would download both tools and compare what they can do out of the box with the stuff they ship, hg has the better user interface and better tools for collaboration. These tools are essentially hg incoming , hg outgoing and the hg serve command. Additionally the zeroconf extension is pretty awesome when you collaborate locally.

Just to give you an example: Georg and me where hacking on Logbook at EuroPython over an ad-hoc Wifi network because the people running the conference were unable to keep the network running. Even though logbook is hosted at github currently, we were using mercurial for hacking locally. You fire up an hg serve in one window and other persons on the network can instantly pull from it. That's patch exchange you don't have to think about, it just works (tm).

On the surface hg and git look very much alike. The commands are now pretty similar and they appear to solve the same problems. However there is a philosophical difference between these two: the handling of branches.

In both hg and git you're exchanging things called changesets. They have an sha1 checksum and are linked with their parents and some other meta information. Whatever information you are changing, the checksum will change as well. So if you would take a changeset and only change the name of the committer, the checksum would change. In hg there is another piece of information that makes a changeset: the branch the changeset was committed to. A branch in hg has a name (one that for a long time was eternal) and in a way a head (the latest commit changeset).

Now to understand my problem you have to keep two things in mind: changesets in hg are linked to the first one that ever happened in the repository (same for git) and that a changeset belongs to a branch, even if merged.

I don't like merging. That might sound strange, but I really don't like merging. I did a lot of merging in hg because it works good enough, but what I started doing with git is picking single changesets and applying their diffs. Why am I doing this? Now first the implications: the checksum changes, because the parents of a changeset will change with that operation. On the other hand it gives you the flexibility to pick a single changeset and apply it to different branches.

So a good example are maintenance branches. My concept of maintenance is to release bugfix releases if enough bugs accumulated. I don't promise a bugfix release upfront, because if the API does not change in a backwards incompatible way and a release is upcoming, I can combine that into one release. Now that might sound like bad release management, and it clearly is not the optimal way, but I am one person doing the releases and I have way too many projects to care about and a limited amount of time.

Now what if at one point there are already two or three bugfixes or a critical bug comes up that absolutely must be released (for example security issues). What I do in git is I check out the tag of the release I want to incorporate the patches and start cherry-picking the patches from the master branch I want to apply. I obviously could not merge with master because then I would pull in all the patches up to the patch I was interested in (remember, they are linked and only exist if the link to the first changeset is fully established).

In git branches are just labels to a changeset. When you cherry pick one changeset from a branch (or a branch of another repo) and apply it to another one, you no longer know where the changeset was coming from. That's a limitation I can totally live with. The cherry picking command in git has a flag that allows me to add a "signed off" flag. That way I can preserve the original author of the changeset and add my own name for the signed off flag. So a changeset shows both authors. Here an example of how this looks like: commit 36a421bb3a235f696131 to Flask. This is actually implemented by just adding a mime-like header as footer to the changeset, nothing fancy with commit metadata etc. However the important thing of this feature is that it's consistently implemented by the little amount of UI that exist in git and other commands. People are aware of this signed off thing.

Doing the same in hg is also possible with the transplant command. The downside is that if you transplant patches from one repo or branch into another one, the incoming and outgoing commands no longer work like you would expect them to do. They compare the checksum of the changeset instead of the checksum of the contents of the patch. And as soon as the UI starts no longer working, user frustration starts happening. But the frustration of a user is not the issue here, the real issue is that this confuses users and will cause them to make (understandable) mistakes. I'm not a revision control system author myself and my knowledge of the tools I'm using is limited to the subset I am using as well. Very often when I get the link to a hg repo from another person I will notice that they have a bugfix hg branch or something similar and screwed up merging with upstream. Sometimes in the process of correcting that mistake I will make another huge mistake myself that I then start correcting in frustration by stripping all the changesets I just made and applying the patch by hand, totally bypassing hg. These mistakes happen because features like remote bookmarks, transplanting changesets and even named branches are not integrated well enough into other commands. Especially that the branch name is imprinted into the changeset is confusing to say the least.

For example the hg repositories on pocoo.org were partially created from a huge subversion repository by an early version of one of the subversion conversion commands. Don't ask me which one, but what it did was naming the default branch everyone works on "trunk". However to the best of my knowledge a hg repository starts with "default" as default branch name and hides that from the user interface. When people now pick up work on one of our converted repos sometimes the confusion kicks in why their hg experiments never had a displayed branch and why certain assumptions are now invalidated. This especially becomes an obvious problem the more git users are out there. A git user has the idea that "git pull" will fetch all the changesets and merge that with the branch they are tracking. Git has a pretty bizarre but working concept to track remote branches that involves entries in the git config I don't understand at all. I'm thankful the git UI provides some support to do that for me. However on the other hand in hg we don't have the concept of tracking remote branches. What we have there instead are just aliases to a URL that points to a hg repository (and lately we can even refer to branches on a remote repo in the URL that is another source of confusion for me I will explain later). hg will pull changes from there and let you do the merge then. Because that is quite repetitive someone came up with the fetch extension for hg that pulls in changes and merges if necessary, otherwise will just update. Now that fetch extension just assumes that if there are two heads it should merge them, otherwise if there is one head it will update, and if it finds anything else it will just error out. You have no idea how many times hg fetch totally destroyed the recent history when I merged in stuff that looked find in hg incoming. Now obviously I should not have used hg fetch in the first place, but a bit of help from the extension would be appreciated. Fetch is also only partially to blame because it predates bookmarks and back then nobody was using named branches.

It all boils down basically to hg having an awesome internal concept that does a lot of things really well, but other things not being properly supported by the user interface I suppose.

In layman terms git's branching concept roughly works like this: all your changesets are linked to at least one parent. A changset has a checksum for the commit + metadata and I think a checksum for the contents of the patch as well. Additionally you can assign names to changesets. There are tags which are aliases to changesets that do not change, and there are branches which are basically names that are moved to a new changeset on commit. Because of how this works you can have changesets that are no longer linked to any place of the history because they point away from one changeset and the name information of their hash is lost. Git has a garbage collector that can remove these things from the repository. There is not much magic in there and obviously it would be very easy for hg to support that, but the core issue here is not the implementation but the user interface. I don't think hg needs git style branches at all!

What hg needs instead is a user interface that is aware of certain operations:

hg push can push bookmarks to remote repositories nowadays, but this also involves pushing multiple heads to the serverside which the hg command currently disallows by default unless you force it to. This is user unfriendly and even if you are an experienced hg user you will most likely not do the force but ask first if you are doing something wrong here.

can push bookmarks to remote repositories nowadays, but this also involves pushing multiple heads to the serverside which the hg command currently disallows by default unless you force it to. This is user unfriendly and even if you are an experienced hg user you will most likely not do the force but ask first if you are doing something wrong here. The special label "tip" in hg moves between branches. This is the worst user interface fail because all tools are interested in tip more than what branch you are on. For example if you are using named branches in hg things like bitbucket, trac (and I think even hgweb) will show you the contents of the default file browser view alternating between different branches. If the last commit was on 0.2-maintenance you will see the contents of the 0.2-maintenance branch by default, if the last commit was on 2.0-new-features it will display that branch instead. I think the invention of a tip label was a mistake. It should have been per-branch instead.

hg incoming / hg outgoing are unaware of things like hg transplant . If you are doing transplanting, hg incoming over the times becomes so filled up with changesets already applied that you better not use it at all. It also forces people you just transplanted patches from delete their local checkout (or strip it to an older revision) and pull again. In git this is not a problem because you just delete your local feature branch and update the separately tracked master branch which will magically include the changes I transplanted. Due to the separate content tracking this will not even transfer larger amounts of data over the wire, because git will already find them locally.

/ are unaware of things like . If you are doing transplanting, hg incoming over the times becomes so filled up with changesets already applied that you better not use it at all. It also forces people you just transplanted patches from delete their local checkout (or strip it to an older revision) and pull again. In git this is not a problem because you just delete your local feature branch and update the separately tracked master branch which will magically include the changes I transplanted. Due to the separate content tracking this will not even transfer larger amounts of data over the wire, because git will already find them locally. The hg heads command is intended to help people merge changes locally by visualizing what unmerged heads are there, but when you start using bookmarks and named branches it's intentional that there are multiple heads. The more branches, the more useless the command. The solution here would be git-like branch tracking so that heads can filter out uninteresting pieces of information.

There is that hg over the time started adopting solutions that actually are not solutions. For example you can have an alias not only for the URL of a repository but the URL of a repository + a branch. That sounds like wonderful thing to have, unfortunately due to the fact that the name of the branch is part of the changesets you will be surprised sooner or later when you merge in changes from another persons repo and suddenly see feature branches appear even though you never specified anything like that. This is a problem that becomes more apparent the more people use hg with git knowledge where it's logical and encouraged to create branches for every single feature you are implementing.

I am not quite sure what the named-branch-in-URL is supposed to fix, but for me it just created more confusion when working with repositories that actually have named branches in that differ from the one or two I have.

So why does hg has these "limitations" in the first place? Probably because the history of the project was not the big-ass Linux kernel (though that is not entirely true) but mercurial itself. And for smaller repositories the git model does not appear too appealing at the first glance. It took me a while to start fully appreciating the possibilities of small branches and now I can't live without them any more.

The git UI might suck, and I still have a hard time with it, but the branching works nicely and so is dealing with other people's patches. It's the perfect tool for me currently when it comes to quickly reviewing and applying patches and it grew on me. I still wonder internally why the hell I'm writing git push origin :branchname to delete a branch remotely :) And with all these UI faults, git has the better UI for branchy development :(

But due to the horrible git UI and the incredible hostility of git for people switching from the friendly lands from mercurial I am pretty sure very few core developer of git had a look a serious at "the other tool" to get an idea of what everybody is buzzing about when the topic "hg and git branching" comes up.