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I've used Git for three years, at two different companies and various personal and community projects. I sync my home directory between hosts using git, I have

I've used Git for three years, at two different companies and various personal and community projects. I sync my home directory between hosts using git, I have administered multi-user git repos using gitosis, and I have been a GitHub user since early 2008. I started using Mercurial two months ago when I joined the Mozilla corporation, and now use it every day on one of the biggest and best-supported installations in the world. I also started using BitBucket for some of my Mozilla-related personal projects. It might be that I don't fully "get" Mercurial yet, but I still find myself frequently missing Git. My first impression is that Git has a simple flexible model that supports a complex front-end, while Mercurial has a simple extensible front-end that ends up creating a somewhat more complicated model. Any time I need to step outside the standard commit-merge-push workflow, I find the higher level of abstraction between Mercurial's user commands and its database makes it harder to understand what I'm doing, and sometimes prevents me from doing what I want. Things like rewriting history (e.g. for rebasing), or combining changes from multiple remote repos with different sets of branches, are still possible in Mercurial - but they usually require plugins to do well, there are more different incompatible ways to do them, and there are more opportunities to mess up your repo. More concretely, I find that MQ is the best way to do many tasks in Mercurial that I would do in git with plain old branches and commits, and for many of these uses MQ is both more complicated and less flexible than the equivalent git commands. (But there are other uses where MQ is really better than the alternatives.) I also find that it's much more annoying to manage short-lived throwaway or topic branches in Mercurial, so much that I simply avoid using them much of the time. But perhaps I'm just brainwashed (or brain-damaged) from too many years with Git. :)

sreque 16y ago
For creating temporary local branches, have you tried the bookmarks and localbranch extensions? Also, I am be interested to learn more about your workflow and why it is so difficult to do in Mercurial. So far, the only feature I've seen in git that I've wanted in Mercurial is the ability to manage publicly named branches using the bookmarks extension, and by extension, an easy way to track named branches.
jwr 16y ago
Good point about MQ, before people pointed me to it, I was continuously surprised by many things I could not easily do in hg. The DVCS crowd looks down on centralized VCSses and points out that whenever the answer to a VCS question begins with "well, you should have done X before you did this…", it marks a failure. Fair enough. But I would extend that further — when I ask "how do I do X with this VCS", I don't want to be told "well see, you don't really want to be doing X". Yes I do want to, and I want a VCS that let's me do pretty much anything I want. That's git's approach.
doublec 16y ago
For Mozilla development I use a git mirror of the tree. I do all my development on branches in that and only use mercurial to push patches to mozilla-central.

sreque 16y ago

For creating temporary local branches, have you tried the bookmarks and localbranch extensions? Also, I am be interested to learn more about your workflow and why it is so difficult to do in Mercurial. So far, the only feature I've seen in git that I've wanted in Mercurial is the ability to manage publicly named branches using the bookmarks extension, and by extension, an easy way to track named branches.

jwr 16y ago

Good point about MQ, before people pointed me to it, I was continuously surprised by many things I could not easily do in hg. The DVCS crowd looks down on centralized VCSses and points out that whenever the answer to a VCS question begins with "well, you should have done X before you did this…", it marks a failure. Fair enough. But I would extend that further — when I ask "how do I do X with this VCS", I don't want to be told "well see, you don't really want to be doing X". Yes I do want to, and I want a VCS that let's me do pretty much anything I want. That's git's approach.

doublec 16y ago

For Mozilla development I use a git mirror of the tree. I do all my development on branches in that and only use mercurial to push patches to mozilla-central.