Renaming to Git and Mercurial: Accuracy and Automation

Question

I have only a few days of experience with Git and Mercurial, and I have little programming experience.

In the last few days, I read a lot of posts comparing them. Based on the read and my tests, I draw the following conclusions:

Git renaming is 100% automatic, but not 100% accurate. It uses an algorithm to guess renames. End users cannot change their decision, even if it is completely wrong.

I believe that the Git method may be fine in 99% of cases, but 1% will cause headaches. This makes me embarrassed to reorganize my code (while changing the name and contents of the class), since I risk losing my file history if there is too much refactoring.

Mercurial can be 100% automatic and 100% accurate, if I always rename / move my things in Visual Studio and install VisualHG, VisualHG should accurately and automatically track the movement and renaming (VisualHG currently has an error - File is not renamed when I moving it between projects ). End users can change this decision if it makes mistakes.

If I don’t have Visual Studio, I can still use TortoiseHg "Copy / rename detection", I can set the similarity percentage, ask Mercurial to automatically detect renames. If he is mistaken, I have the opportunity to correct him.

Are my findings right or wrong?

Link:

Git and Mercurial - Compare and Contrast

Answer 1

Here you can see the difference explained, but basically you are right. Mercurial has rename and mv that do the “real” renaming, and Git mv just does rm and add . It also seems that Mercurial can mimic Git behavior and guess your renames, a pretty nice feature. From Git's experience, the rename detection algorithm makes the wrong decisions - especially if you copy the file and modify two copies a little - in most cases this will be wrong.

Answer 2

I don’t think that Mercurial’s ability to track file renaming is nearly as perfect as it seems, it might be. I don't have much experience with Git, but I have a good bit with Mercurial, and renaming files seems to work fine in some contexts ( hg view understands them) if you didn't do anything “interesting” (which seems to be happening somewhat often).

And Git, at least in reputation, is supposed to make you a low level history change if you need to.