An in-depth analysis of Mercurial and Git branches

I’ve discussed the advantages of Git over Mercurial many times (e.g. here, and here), and I even created a challenge for Mercurial supporters, but in this blog post I’ll try to refrain from doing judgments and concentrate on the actual facts (the key-word being try).

Continuing this full disclosure; I’ve never actually used Mercurial, at least on a day-to-day basis, where I actually had to get something done. But I’ve used it plenty of times testing many different things, precisely to find out how to do things that I can do easily in Git. In addition, I’ve looked deep into the code to figure out how to overcome some of what I considered limitations of the design. And finally, I wrote Git’s official GitMercurial bridge; git-remote-hg (more here).

So, because I’ve spent months figuring out how to achieve certain things in Mercurial, and after talking with the best and the brightest (Git, gitifyhg, hg-git, and Mercurial developers), and exploring the code myself, I can say with a good degree of confidence that if I claim something cannot be done in Mercurial, that’s probably the case. In fact, I invited people from the #mercurial IRC channel in Freenode to review this article, and I invite everyone to comment down below if you think there’s any mistake (comments are welcome).

Git vs. Mercurial branches

Now, I’ve explained before why I think the only real difference between Git and Mercurial is how they handle branches. Basically; Git branches are all-purpose, all-terrain, and Mercurial have different tools for different purposes, and can almost do as much as Git branches, but not quite.

I thought the only real limitation was that Mercurial branches (or rather bookmarks), didn’t nave a per-repository namespace. For example: in Git the branch “development” can be in different repositories, and point to different commits, and to visualize them, you can refer to “max/development” (Max’s development branch), “sarah/development” (Sarah’s), “origin/development” (The central repository version), “development” (your own version). In Mercurial you only have “development”, and that’s it. I consider that a limitation of Mercurial, but feel free to consider it a “difference”. But it turns out there’s more.

In Git, it’s easy to add, remove, rename, and move branches. In Mercurial, bookmarks are supposed to work like Git branches, however, they don’t change the basics of how Mercurial works, and in Mercurial it doesn’t matter if you have a bookmark or not pointing to a commit, it’s still there, and completely visible; in Mercurial, each branch can have multiple “heads”, it doesn’t matter if there’s a bookmark pointing to it or not. So in order to remove a bookmark (and its commits), you need to use “hg strip” command, and to use that command, you need to enable the MqExtension, however, that’s for local repositories, for remote ones you need to cross your fingers, and hope your server has a way to do that — Bitbucket does through its web UI, but it’s possible that there is just no way.

Mercurial advocates often repeat the mantra “history is sacred”, and Mercurial’s documentation attempts to explain why changing history is hard, that shows why it’s hard to remove bookmarks (and it’s commits); it’s just Mercurial’s design.

On the other hand, if you want to remove a branch in git; you can just do “git push :feature-a“. Whether “history is sacred” or not is left for each project to decide.

Solving divergence

In any version control system, divergence is bound to happen, and in distributed ones, even more. Mercurial and Git solve this problem in very different ways, lets see how by looking at a very simple divergent repository:

As you can see we have a “Fix” in our local branch, but somebody already did an “Update” to this branch in the remote repository. Both Mercurial and Git would barf when you try to push this “Fix” commit, but lets see how to solve it in each.

In Git this problem is called a “non fast-forward” push, which means that “Fix” is not an ancestor of the tip of the branch (“Update”), so the branch cannot be fast-forwarded to “Fix”. There are three options: 1) force the push (git push --force), which basically means override “origin/master” to point to “master”, which effectively dumps “Update” 2) merge “Update” and “Fix” and then push 3) rebase “Fix” on top of “Update” and then push. Obviously dropping commits is not a good idea, so either a merge or a rebase are recommended, and both would create a new commit that can be fast-forwarded from “Update”.

In Mercurial, the problem is called “multiple heads”. In Git “origin/master” and “master” are two different branches, but in Mercurial, they are two heads of the same branch. To solve the problem, you can start by running “hg heads“, which will show you all the heads of all the branches, in this case “Fix” and “Update” would be the heads of the “default” branch (aka. “master”). Then you have also three options: 1) force the push (hg push --force), although in appearance it looks the same as the Git command, it does something completely different; it pushes the new head to the remote 2) merge and push 3) rebase and push (you need the rebase extension). Once again, the first option is not recommended, because it shifts the burden from one developer to multiple ones. In theory, the developer that is pushing the new commit would know how to resolve the conflicts in case they arise, so (s)he is the one that should resolve them, and not take the lazy way out and shift the burden to other developers.

Either way solves the problem, but Git uses remote namespaces, which I already shown are useful regardless, and the other requires the concept of multiple heads. That is one reason why the concept of “anonymous heads”, that is used as an example of a feature Mercurial has over Git, is not really needed.

Mercurial bookmarks and the forced push problem

The biggest issue (IMO) I found with Mercurial bookmarks is how to create them in the first place. The issue is subtle, but it affects Git-like workflows, and specially Git<->Mercurial bridges, either way it’s useful to understand Mercurial’s design and behavior.

Suppose you have a very simple repository:

In Git, “feature-a” is a branch, and you can just push it without problems. In Mercurial, if “feature-a” is a bookmark, you can’t just push it, because if you do, the “default” branch would have two heads. To push this new bookmark, you need to do “hg push --force“. However, this only happens if the commit “Update” is made, also, you can push “feature-a” if it points to “Init”, and after pushing the bookmark, you can update it to include the “Feature A” commit. The end result is the same, but Mercurial barfs if you try to push the bookmarks and the commits at the same time, and there’s an update on the branch.

There’s no real reason why this happens, it’s probably baggage from the fact that Mercurial bookmarks are not an integral part of the design, and in fact began as an extension that was merged to the core in v1.8.

To workaround this problem in git-remote-hg, I wrote my own simplified version of the push() method that ignores checks for new heads, because in Git there cannot be more than one head per branch. The code still checks that the remote commit of this branch is an ancestor of the new one, if not, you would need to do ‘git push –force’, just like in Git. Essentially, you get exactly the same behavior of Git branches, with Mercurial bookmarks.

Fixing Git

All right, I’m done trying to avoid judgement, but to try to be fair, I’ll start by mentioning the one (and only one) feature that Git lacks in comparison to Mercurial; find the branch-point of a branch, that is; the point where a branch was created (or rebased onto). It is trivial to figure that out visually, and there are scripts that do a pretty good job of finding that out from the topology of the repository, but there are always corner-cases where this doesn’t work. For more details on the problem and proposed solutions check the stackoverflow question.

Personally I’ve never needed this, but if you absolutely need this, it’s easy to patch Git, I wrote a few patches that implement this:

https://github.com/felipec/git/commits/fc/tail

This implements the @{tail} notation, which is similar to the official @{upstream} notation, so you can do something like “development@{tail}”, which will point to the first commit the “development” branch was created on.

If this was really needed, the patches could be merged to upstream Git, but really, it’s not.

Fixing Mercurial

On the other hand fixing Mercurial wouldn’t be that easy:

1. Support remote ‘hg strip’. Just like Git can easily delete remote commits, Mercurial should be able to.
2. Support remote namespaces for bookmarks. Begin able to see where “sarah/development” points to, is an invaluable feature.
3. Improve bookmark creation. So the user doesn’t need to force the push depending on the circumstances

Thanks to git-remote-hg, you can resolve 2) and 3) by using Git to work with Mercurial repositories, unfortunately, there’s nothing anybody can do for 1), it’s something that has to be fixed in Mercurial’s core.

Conclusion

I often hear people say that what you can achieve with Git, you can achieve with Mercurial, and vice versa, and at the end of the day it’s a matter of preference, but that’s not true. Hopefully after reading this blog post, you are able to distinguish what can and cannot be done in each tool.

And again, as usual, all comments are welcome, so if you see a mistake in the article, by all means point it out.

Cheers.