Re: Mercurial 0.4b vs git patchbomb benchmark

Linus Torvalds
2005-04-29T14:35:31Z

On Fri, 29 Apr 2005, Matt Mackall wrote:
>
> Mercurial is even younger (Linus had a few days' head start, not to
> mention a bunch of help), and it is already as fast as git, relatively
> easy to use, much simpler, and much more space and bandwidth
> efficient.

You've not mentioned two out of my three design goals:
- distribution
- reliability/trustability

ie does mercurial do distributed merges, which git was designed for, and
does mercurial notice single-bit errors in a reasonably secure manner, or
can people just mess with history willy-nilly?

For the latter, the cryptographic nature of sha1 is an added bonus - the
_big_ issue is that it is a good hash, and an _exteremely_ effective CRC
of the data. You can't mess up an archive and lie about it later. And if
you have random memory or filesystem corruption, it's not a "shit happens"
kind of situation - it's a "uhhoh, we can catch it (and hopefully even fix
it, thanks to distribution)" thing.

I had three design goals. "disk space" wasn't one of them, so you've
concentrated on only one so far in your arguments.

Linus