[Python-Dev] PEP 481 - Migrate Some Supporting Repositories to Git and Github

[Pierre-Yves David]

On 11/29/2014 06:01 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> The reason the PEP primarily focuses on the popularity of the the tool is
> because as you mentioned, issues like poor documentation, bad support for a
> particular platform, a particular workflow not being very good can be
> solved by working with the tool authors to solve that particular problem. I wouldn’t
> consider those issues in a vacuum to be a good reason to migrate away from that
> tool.

As I understand it[1] my current employer (Facebook) picked Mercurial 
over git because these very reason end up being important. And this 
analysis have been validated by another big company[2].

Git implementation is very tied to the linux world and this slowed down 
its gain of a windows support. This is not something that will change by 
discussing with author: "btw can you rewrite your tool with different 
techno and concept?".
Mercurial is extensible in Python, very extensible. In my previous job 
one of our client switched to Mercurial and was able to get an extension 
adding commands to match it exact previous code-review workflow in a 
couple of hundred line of python. (you could have the same for python).
Mercurial developer are already connected to the Python community. They 
are invited to language submit, regular pycon speaker and attendees etc.

All these things contradict "bah any project would not make a difference"

> However there’s very little that CPython can do to get more people using
> Mercurial, and presumably the authors of Mercurial are already doing  what they
> can to get people to use them.

Mercurial is an open source project. We have no communication 
department, no communication budget actually. Over the year, more and 
more contributors are actually paid to do so, but they usually focus on 
"making employer's users" happy. Something that rarely involves getting 
more outside-world users. We mostly rely on the network effect to gain 
more users, (yes, we are losing to git on this, but still growing 
anyway). Part of this network effect is having big project like CPython 
using Mercurial. It also imply that CPython dev are willing to look at 
how the tools works and that the Project tries to take advantage of the 
tools strength. This would turn the situation into mutual benefits. You 
are happy with Mercurial and we are happy with Python.

However moving to git and github send a very different signal: If you 
want to be a successful command line tool, use C and bash. If you want 
to be a successful website use ruby on rails.

-- 
Pierre-Yves David

[1] This is a personal statement is not to be linked to the opinion of 
my employer PR department.
[2] That I'm not naming in fear of there PR assasins.