LWN has an article with a nice chunky comment thread talking about the history of DVCSes and how git has basically taken over the category. Mozilla, of course, still mostly uses Mercurial, but there’s a lot of people who prefer git now, and there are bridges and stuff.

I have a weird perspective on all of this. I hacked on Monotone back in the day, so I have the basic DVCS concept cold, and Mercurial is only a little different; it never surprises me. Git, however… I read the documentation, and I think I understand what’s going on, and then I do something that according to (my understanding of) the documentation should do what I want, and instead it mangles my local repo and I get to spend an hour or two repairing it. Or, in one memorable case, it mangled the remote, shared repo—thankfully that was easily fixed once I figured out what it had done, but I still don’t know why it did that instead of what I expected it to. (A matter of which branch’s HEAD pointer got updated with the result of a merge.) I’ve been actively hacking on projects whose primary VCS is Git for over a year now and this consistently happens to me about once every 20 to 40 hours of coding time.

So I don’t trust Git and I don’t like using it. I do, however, appreciate its speed, which as far as I can tell is down to back-end stuff—storage format, network protocol, and so on. So here’s what I want: I want someone to write an exact clone of the Mercurial CLI that uses git’s back end. I have no time, but I would totally contribute money to the development of this. It has to be an exact clone in terms of command line behavior, though. If that means throwing away front-end features of Git, I am 100% fine with that. I would happily lose the index/working copy distinction, for instance. I could also live with losing support for arbitrary Mercurial extensions; I would miss MQ in principle but I suspect there’s an alternate development model for Mozilla that doesn’t need it. Everyone else seems to manage.

Anyone else interested in something like that?