alt Hacker NewsWell I can explain git to anybody who understands a DAG. And mercurial is also based on the exact same data structure. So yes it would be very surprising if you didn't consider it to be "acceptable".
The fact that there's lots of training data out there on strange git states is proof of exactly my point. Git is popular and thus used by lots of people who don't know the first thing about the command line, let alone data structures. Had mercurial won you'd see exactly the same types of errors commonly appearing.
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If I spend a couple hours reading I can understand how git works, but I'm going to forget an hour later because it is so damn complicated with all the different details that my brain flushes it's cache to make room for something with less violently confusing edge cases.
> Well I can explain git to anybody who understands a DAG.
This. Right here. This is the difference.
I can explain Mercurial to people who don't want to understand a DAG.
For non-professional developers, the "merge machinery" is completely worthless.
The difference is that Mercurial lets you duck it until you need it while Git slaps you in the face with it at every commit.
For the non-professional developer, the flow is "commit, commit, commit, commit, whoops--how many commits do I need to go back to fix things?, oh, 2, okay--revert, commit, commit, commit, commit, ...
At no point in their day are they facing "merge". And that makes all the difference.
Mercurial doesn't require understanding a DAG.
You can get by with `hg next`, `hg prev`, and `hg rebase -s <from> -d <to>` to move entire chains of commits around. Commands with obvious names that allow moving around without understanding chains of dependencies. No weird states where you checkout an old commit but random files from where you just were are left in the directory tree for you to deal with. No difference between `checkout`, `reset --soft`, and `reset --hard` to remember. No detached head states.
And no, `HEAD~1` is not a replacement for `prev`. One is a shortening of "previous", one requires you to remember a magic constant based on knowledge of the DAG.
As for `hg next`, the various responses here should show how clear, obvious, and intuitive the git UI is: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6759791/how-do-i-move-fo...