In our company some developers from time to time propose we should move from Subversion to Git. I don’t see any point for that because Subversion is working quite well for us and if someone wants to use Git they can do it with git-svn. However for my pet projects I want to use some DVCS and for that I have used Git for a while. When I started to investigate Byteflow I also started to use Mercurial because Byteflow source is on Mercurial repository. I have also investigated little bit Bazaar, but from that I don’t have any real use experience (hope I will get some day). You can find out lot of hype and discussion about Git, but I have to say I have little bit ambivalence feelings of Git.
Git is really powerful tool and has quite lot of features, like —interactive option which can be useful on some cases. At Same time this powerfulness and feature richness makes it sometimes hard to use. When commands have a lot of options they are not anymore really intuitive. In this short experience which I have used Mercurial I have really enjoyed it’s user interface and have to say it is more intuitive than Git’s UI. I don’t know is this because Mercurial’s commands are quite similar with Subversion and I have many years experience of Subversion.
In this Git hype I am glad to see some other people are feeling same way of Mercurial. Topfunky posted nice post “Five Features from Mercurial That Would Make Git Suck Less” where he points out five features, which Git should steal from Mercurial. Also Zachary Voase compared Git and Mercurial on his post ”Why Mercurial > Git, or How I Learned To Stop Censoring Myself and Participate in Flamewars.” He had god point, even his way of using LOC as comparing argument is quite funny and post was down voted on Reddit because of that.
On our company I don’t see move from Subversion in near future, but for my next pet project I think I will pick Mercurial for VCS because I really enjoy to use it (plus it is been coded using python ;). I also hope that Git will improve their user interface because it is great tool. Now it’s like Linux: too difficult for beginners but great tools for power users (at least this seems to be quite general opinion of Linux) and Mercurial is more like OS X: easy for beginners and same time it gives enough options and tweaking possibilities for power users.
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