The war is over, everyone has won

Last week, Fog Creek announced the end of the war between Git and Mercurial. More precisely, announced in such an extravagant way the release of Kiln 3.0 with the support of simultaneous work with repositories via Git or Mercurial.

Kiln is an online hosting of Hg and Git repositories with an advanced code review system and management of project groups and users. In connection with the new release and provocative statement about the DVCS war, and the fact that Kiln is not very well represented in Habré, several key points are worth mentioning.

For example, that the free version of Kiln is not limited in time if you have up to 2 users ...
')
Indeed, the free "version" of Kiln is for some reason not very advertised, and as a result, the majority consider it to be exclusively a paid service. Perhaps the fact is that with 2 users, Kiln's strengths become less significant.

Kiln's distinguishing features are convenient code review, access control for repositories and quick as-you-type search in code and comments to commit. Then I will stop a little on each item from this list and on the basic functionality of the DVCS server.

Kiln organizes repositories into a project-group-central-repository-branch hierarchy. Kiln branches in this case are also repositories, which can confuse the user somewhat. But in a team with them it is sometimes even more convenient to work on a separate function as compared to the Git / Hg branches. Users can have access to read, branch, modify, or fully administer at each level or specific object in this hierarchy.

Actually, it is already clear from this that initially Kiln aimed at large corporate clients. But at the moment it is more popular with medium-sized startups.

An example of a project with several groups (but without branched repositories) can be viewed on the open source mirror of the developments used in FogCreek: mirrors.kilnhg.com/Code/Mirrors

On the same mirror, you can try searching by code and comments - the speed really impressed me. But for the code review you will have to do a trial (or if you have enough 2 users, then a permanent one) account .

A review is a set of changesets with the ability to see changes in text files or images, and comment on the general idea or specific lines of code. Each of the programmers in the review marks it as "acceptable", "needs some work", or "unacceptable".

It is worth noting that changes included in the review are noted both in the history tree of the repository and in the annotate of a specific file. As a result, you can always tell which changesets and lines of code were checked.

Even in the history tree, I liked the highlighting of the changes that preceded the one selected and the descendants - it is easy to see which changes were made in parallel and could break integration tests.

In basic functions, Kiln is not very different from competitors - viewing change history, navigating through branches and tags, navigating through files of a specific version, annotate / blame for files, online editing, support for markdown in readme, integration with mail, chats, CI servers , online application hosting. etc.

Maybe a little lack of statistics on changes. Kiln limited to “Activity feed” - a page with a change log, where you can set up what events and repositories to follow or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Well, for introduction in the style of "Kiln gallop", perhaps, is enough. Now about the “end of the DVCS war”. Those who read up to this point in order to argue that it is better - a stricter Mercury or a more democratic and popular Git, I will probably disappoint. I tend towards Gita for distributed (by the number of developers and time) projects and to Hg for more critical tracking of changes in history, but, frankly, these preferences are minimal.

Obviously, in order not to lose clients, Kiln, in any case, needed the support of the Gita in the wake of his popularity. But for how many clients is it exactly the simultaneous use of both Git and Mercurial ... we'll see. Hopefully FogCreek will someday publish the results of this experiment.

The war is over, everyone has won

Links

More articles: