Git vs Mercurial
Because I’ve seen the word Mercurial time and again without even knowing what it exactly does ( yeah of course I know that it is a distributed revision control system ), I’ve decided to look it up. Because I’ve been starting to depend on and use Git more frequently I naturally tend to compare it to Git.
As starting point served me, as ever so often, stackoverflow where I found this question: what is the difference between mercurial and git? There I found an link pointing to Git vs. Mercurial: Please Relax and The Differences Between Mercurial and Git .
Noteworthy in Git vs. Mercurial: Please Relax the author compares Git to McGyver and Mercurial to James Bond, which is kind of funny 
.
Everybody who is interested can go own reading those linked articles. I for myself have done so and sum up the pros and cons below:
| Git | Mercurial | |
|---|---|---|
| Learning curve: | – | ++ |
| Versatility | +++ | - |
| API | – | + |
| switching from Subversion | – | +++ |
| speed | +++ | |
| no. of separate tools comprising software | 144 | 1 |
| Philosphophy | Unix | Mac |
| written in | mainly C | python |
| can change history? | yes | no |
| most prominent hoster | GitHub | BitBucket (supports Git as well ) |
| workflow | flexible | fix |
| major flaw | documentation | deleting named branches |
does that mean you stick to git?
For the time being I’m quite content with Git. But I will give Mercurial a go ( and Bazaar ) when I got time to do so. I want to have a look at the Mercurial api.
A really good reason for staying with Git is GitHub, it’s just an awesome community.