On 03/19/2012 10:02 AM, Daryle Walker wrote:
Git has a competitor called Mercurial? If we're moving to a Distributed-VCS, should we go to Mercurial instead of Git? They're kind-of like CVS vs. Subversion, except I think they came up in parallel. (While Subversion was designed as an updated CVS.) I think Git was made up of a bunch of script hacks, while Mercurial was a regimented single program. I don't have a preference, but I want to make sure we consider the rival options.
My organization recently switched from SVN to git. Pretty much everyone was very happy with the result. We also considered mercurial, and we all agreed that choosing between git and mercurial wasn't nearly as important as choosing either of them instead of svn. That said, there are differences, and I'm glad we picked git. I think the market- and mind-share arguments are real, and in git's favor. Anecdotally at least, it's interesting that bitbucket - which started as an all-mercurial hosting site - has more recently added git support: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/04/01/announcing-git-support/ And I think it's also telling that while git's branching model - one of the most important aspects of a VCS - is basically the same one it has always had, mercurial's branching model has evolved towards the git model (mercurial bookmarks == git branches). So I think there's circumstantial evidence that git is a better design in some ways. Mercurial is superficially more similar to svn, but given that they're both architecturally very different from svn, I think that could just as easily be seen as an advantage for git. Jim Bosch