Friday, April 24, 2009

Google code actually becomes useful! Supports a DVCS! MERCURIAL!

Google Code Blog: Mercurial support for Project Hosting on Google Code
We are happy to announce that Project Hosting on Google Code now supports the Mercurial version control system in addition to Subversion. This is being initially rolled out as a preview release to a few invited users on a per-project basis, so that we can iron out the kinks before making this available to the general public.


While there were several DVCSs that we could support, our decision to support Mercurial was based on two key reasons. The primary reason was to support our large base of existing Subversion users that want to use a distributed version control system. For these users we felt that Mercurial had the lowest barrier to adoption because of its similar command set, great documentation (including a great online book), and excellent tools such as Tortoise Hg. Second, given that Google Code's infrastructure is built for HTTP-based services, we found that Mercurial had the best protocol and performance characteristics for HTTP support. For more information, see our analysis.

2 comments:

markc said...

That is a very dissapointing and unfortunate decision so I'm moving my project to github.com. Such a pity as I like GoogeCode for everything except lack of Git support.

Ted Pavlic said...

For those who need a translation table between git and Mercurial, see the reference:

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/GitConcepts
There is a nice "conversion table" at the bottom of it (for the most common commands).


For those who need to convert from Git to Mercurial, you can do that with native Mercurial. See:

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/ConvertExtension
For those who need to convert from Mercurial to Git, see:

http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/InterfacesFrontendsAndTools
Search for "Mercurial" and look in the section "Intearction with other Revision Control Systems."