How does Mercurial stack up against GIT and SVN?

Question

With Phil Haack and others recently tweeting about CodePlex's move to support Mercurial as a DVCS, I thought it might be worth a look.

As someone who currently uses SVN for personal projects and TFS at The Office, how does Mercurial compare in terms of usability, features and what are some of the better Mercurial hosting services available?

Answer 1

As far as comparing to Git, Google recently published an interesting comparison of Git and Mercurial based on their evaluation: http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis

Answer 2

Compared to SVN, for which I recently worked with again after quite awhile, Mercurial is amazing. It gave me a feeling of "Why would anyone use SVN anymore". SVN is pretty good, but Mercurial really does just work better.

For personal projects I would switch without a doubt to a DVCS. It does everything SVN does but better, and much faster. The "learning curve" is just understanding some terminology.

In reality the difference between SVN and a DVCS is that everyone has a full working repository on their system. If you decide to have a "master server", it is exactly the same as what you have, except it is setup to continually serve over a network. To sync these all you do is send/receive(push/pull) the changes between these repositories.