I give up - switching to GItHub

Well, I officially give up.  I'm switching to GitHub.

If you read back through this blog, you might get the idea that I'm a bit of a contrarian.  I'm generally not the type to jump on the latest popular thing.  I'd rather go my own way and do what I think is best than go along with the crowd.  But at the same time, I know a lost cause when I see it and I can recognize when it's time to cut my losses.

For many years, I ran my own Mercurial repository on my web host, including the web viewer interface, as well as my own issue tracker (originally MantisBT, more recently The Bug Genie).  However, I've reached the point where I can't justify doing that anymore.  So I'm giving up and switching over to GitHub like everybody else.

I take no real pleasure in this.  I've been using Git professionally for many years, but I've never been a big fan of it.  I mean, I can't say it's bad - it's not.  But I think it's hard to use and more complicated than it needs to be.  As a comment I once saw put it, Git "isn't a revision control system, it's more of a workflow tool that you can use to do version control."  And I still think the only reason Git got popular is because it was created by programming celebrity Linus Torvalds.  If it had been created by Joe Nobody I suspect it would probably be in the same boat as Bazaar today.

That said, at this point it's clear that Git has won the distributed VCS war, and done so decisively.  Everything supports Git, and nothing supports Mercurial.  Heck, even BitBucket, the original cloud Mercurial host, is now dropping Mercurial support.  For me, that was kind of the final nail in the coffin.  

That's not the only reason for my switch, though.  There are a bunch of smaller things that have been adding up over time:

  • There's just more tool support for Git.  These days, if a development tool has any VCS integration, it's for Git.  Mercurial is left out in the cold.
  • While running my own Mercurial and bug tracker installations isn't a huge maintenance burden, it is a burden.  Every now and then they break because of my host changing some configuration, or they need to be upgraded.  These days my time is scarce and it's no longer fun or interesting to do that work.
  • There are some niggling bugs in my existing environment.  The one that really annoys me is that my last Mercurial upgrade broke the script that integrates it with The Bug Genie.  I could probably fix it if I really wanted to, but the script is larger than you'd expect and it's not enough of an annoyance to dedicate the time it would take to become familiar with it.
  • My web host actually now provides support for Git hosting.  So I can actually still have my own repo on my own hosting (in addition to GitHub) without having to do any extra work.
  • Honestly, at this point I've got ore experience with Git than Mercurial, to the point that I find myself trying to run Git commands in my Mercurial repos.  So by using Mercurial at home I'm kind of fighting my own instincts, which is counterproductive.

So there you have it.  I'm currently in the process of converting all my Mercurial repos to Git.  After that, I'll look at moving my issue tracking in to GitHub.  In the long run, it's gonna be less work to just go with the flow.

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