Why do you use Git over Mercurial? (Or vice versa.) [closed]

Question

I currently use Git, and am generally happy with it, but I'd like to know more about Mercurial. Does it have any advantages over Git? What are the advantages of Git over Mercurial?

I realize there are already detailed comparisons of the two, but that's not what I'm asking for. I don't want dispassionate information, but rather impassioned (but polite!!!) reasons why you think one is better/easier/faster/smarter/stronger/etc.

Answer 1

I have used both Mercurial and git and I vastly prefer hg to git; it just feels nicer. Steve Losh in his blog post The Real Difference Between Mercurial and Git sums up most of my feelings about it. Here are some quotes which I agree wholeheartedly with:

I think there’s still one very, very important difference left: the systems feel very different to use.

I personally find Mercurial’s philosophy easier to work with. It’s easy for me to wrap my head around commands when they’re more modular and less monolithic.

I personally don’t like the index. I feel that git encourages people to check in changesets that contain code which they’ve never tested (or even built) because the index is such a prominent part of git’s workflow.

I've found the index a pain to work with - if I want something like that (and more powerful, too) I'll use mq. In the mean time - why should I be forced to have different types of adds, etc.? Why should I be forced to use git commit -a (and have git status - where is git st? - show weird info)?

Quite seriously, I personally can attribute the success and wide acceptance of git to nothing other than GitHub. Steve latches onto that, too. How may people have been through this, and "given in" to pressure from git users?

I don’t like using git itself (though it’s far better than SVN or CVS), but GitHub is such an awesome site that I’ve considered switching just to use it.

I'll continue to only use git/GitHib when required to - when I want to make a patch to something that's on there. My own projects will continue to use Mercurial. It feels nicer.

Answer 2

(A) Top 3 real reasons I use Git rather than Mercurial by choice:

1. historical stochasticity / inertia
2. historical stochasticity / inertia
3. historical stochasticity / inertia

(B) Given the above, the top 3 things I like about Git over Mercurial:

1. the index
2. lightweight branches
3. sane tagging (a tag is not a commit that follows the commit that is being tagged)

(C) The three things Mercurial has for it over Git:

1. better native documentation (emphasis on native, because the ProGit book is simply outstanding, and anyone who has any complaints about Git or the Git model being too complex or confusing should go directly there)
2. sequential commit numbering (local repository scope only, but I imagine this might sometimes be more convenient than cutting-and-pasting SHA-1's when fiddling about?)
3. nicer logo/name?

I think that all (most?) of the items in (B) are either a result of me being used to the Git model due to (A) or can be "fixed" in Mercurial through plug-ins. But the fact remains that Git works the way I want it to out of the box, and I can live without any of the (C) items [given that C(1) is rendered a non-issue due to the excellent ProGit book]. And, so, I continue to use Git over Mercurial.