Winning and 'being dead' are two things that mean different things to different people. Git has at least an order of magnitude more people use it, and there is

Winning and 'being dead' are two things that mean different things to different people. Git has at least an order of magnitude more people use it, and there is a significant and growing ecosystem around it that mercurial does not have. Mercurial is not going to 'die' until the developers abandon it; you can still use and install it. Hell, even cvs isn't 'dead', and the last stable release was in 2008. Mercurial will also continue to 'not be dead' for the foreseeable future, and people will use it for years to come. ...but it is already niche, and will increasingly become so. Only time will tell, but I'd be shocked if you don't see more big name migrations away from hg over the next year or two. People are important. When your project forces them to use tools that don't like or don't know, they go else where. The impetus to change gathers more slowly in companies; but when you see announcements like this, like google code, like atlassian marginalizing hg, like cpython... it's crazy to suggest that it doesn't affect the way people think about mercurial.