I don't want to show hg to people who don't explicitly want it, though. Hg will have to summit the mountain of relevance on their own merits before I confuse people with two options.
Is there any metric you can commit to for when you will agree to put hg in the navbar? Otherwise it's a goal without an end.
My personal opinion is that:
- It's not going to confuse many people. Maybe they'll click it out of curiosity and then click back to git, what they really want to use.
- sourcehut is happy to accept the BitBucket refugees but not happy to display the support with the other features. I don't know how to describe that but it doesn't feel quite right to me. It feels like a bit of a catch-22, the likely best service to support hg won't display it until hg becomes more relevant but it's also probably a vector for making hg more relevant if it did display it.
FWIW, the only reason I am paying for sourcehut is because of hg support. I get that hg is not as popular as git, and it's unlikely to be anytime soon. The reasoning in this ticket seems to have no objective solution, though.
I imagine what the solution will look like is changing the current git/hg link into a dropdown, where the most often used service is shown first, and git is shown first by default.
I am happy to support the Mercurial community as much as I can, but that is only insofar as providing a good hosting solution for Mercurial users is concerned. Increasing the supply of Mercurial users, on the other hand, is not one of my goals; I leave that task up to the Mercurial community. For myself, I have to put the success of Sourcehut ahead of the success of Mercurial, and until Mercurial gains a lot more mindshare that means accomodating git users with the defaults. I don't want someone to mistakenly end up on hg.sr.ht and create a repo, then be unable to push to it with git and not understand why.
Note, there are lots of places where smoothing the Hg experience is possible without jeopardizing the git experience. For example:
That doesn't really answer my initial question: what metric(s) can someone present to you where you would say that hg is worth putting in the navbar, whatever that particular solution looks like?
I think the concern of someone accidentally making a hg repo is unlikely but at this point its your belief against mine. On the other hand, as someone trying to promote hg use, when people ask me where they can host repos I have to say sourcehut and then quickly explain that it's only supported if you know where to find it (there is a link to it on sourcehut.org but I don't think most users would expect to have to click that link, and only that link). And I can't even say "but if we get to 1000 hg repos, Drew has committed to put it on the front page".
I'm interested in showing it as soon as I write the patches (or someone sends them to me) using the solution I described:
I imagine what the solution will look like is changing the current git/hg link into a dropdown, where the most often used service is shown first, and git is shown first by default.
Today we already show the one you use most often.
Ah ok, apologies if I misinterpreted what you said. My understanding was that you were not interested in showing hg at all until hg became more popular, and at that point you'd consider a dropdown.
Why not show git first, and then show hg after the user has at least 1 mercurial repo? Are we so strapped for horizontal space that we don't have room for 2 characters?
Today we already show the one you use most often. This doesn't seem to be the case - I have 4 mercurial repositories and 0 git repositories, but I'm still shown git, not hg.
I use both git and hg quite often, and fiddling with a dropdown box every time I want to change between them doesn't sound very appealing. Showing the hg link if the user has a mecurial repository sounds reasonable to me.
Alternatively, I think combining both into a genericreposlist makes more sense. When I'm looking at repos online, I don't really care which VCS a particular repository uses, since I'm not manipulating anything, just viewing.
Today we already show the one you use most often.
I use only mercurial, however I'm being shown only git. Something is not working.
~ociaw's solution looks like a good one to me. If not that, then at least put it in the navbar. I don't think anyone is going to be particularly confused by hg's presence, since it wouldn't be overriding git.
For the record, a cookie is kept on each machine that keeps a count of times you visit git.sr.ht and hg.sr.ht, and whichever one has more visits is displayed on the navbar.