Git vs Mercurial and the fight of SCMs

In the past I was using Subversion as a SCM (Source Control Managment) and Google's project hosting is still using it, so Google Code was allways a good place for hosting some open source code.
But now the world has changed. I recognized the idea of distributed SCM (DSCM) first, when I heard about github.com and I gave it try. The big benefits are, that you can work offline and everyone has his own repository with full versioning and so on. The result for my own work is, that I do much more commits and of cause smaller ones. Just after doing a cupple of them, I push my changes to the server.

But What is the right system and right hoster?

This is a very interesting question and it forced me to test a little bit around. And I found a cupple of benefits on each system and each hoster. But in the end I decided to stay on Google Code and use Mercurial.
The reasons are pretty simple:

• Mercurial isn't that different from Git as I expected.
• Social comopents are not so interesting for a project hosting.
• Google has a much better code and history browsing than github.
• Extisting Subversion projects can be converted including history.

So my desicision was clear. I mooved the DuckWiki repo to Google Code, and will use Google Code and Mercurial in the future.

If you're thinking about Mercurial and Git, there is another point, you might be interested in, which I didn't care about so much:
While Git only works over SSH, Mercurial provides you the choice between SSH (makes maybe more sence in a Company's internal network) and HTTP (is much nicer, if you're repo should be open for annonymous users).

Social coding and Twitter

A nice feature on github.com is, that you can add your Twitter credencials to a project and all commits to this projects will be twittered. That's a nice way to be notified on changes. The other part is, that comments on your commits get a new sence in being Twitter posts.

If you would like to be notified on DuckWiki just follow duckwiki.

Cooler coding with Git on github.com

In the past I've choosen Google Code to host my open source code, but with DuckWiki, I started using Git hosted on github.com. Git is not the only distributed version control system and there are some things, which are not so cool, like there is no real native Windows support (but I kicked Windows out of my life for a while). Google Code provides Mercurial as an distributed version control system and they told the rest of the world how they implemented Mercurial on their system.

But at least their are two reasons for github.com.

• Private repos: If you pay, you'll get private repositories for non-open-source projects.
• Social coding: github.com provides a cupple of cool features like following other coders, watching their projects, etc. It makes it all feeling like a real community of coders.

Even the Grails team is using it.

So get on, create a account and follow me or duckwiki project on github.com