git is pretty good at dealing with lots of local branches. it has git-stash which supports that even further (stash it now, come back to it later). it has a sta

git is pretty good at dealing with lots of local branches. it has git-stash which supports that even further (stash it now, come back to it later). it has a staging area which allows you to slice and dice your commits. it seems to be better and allowing you to rewrite the commit history. i don't like git-repack, git-gc. i prefer the hg revlog approach. hg can package all of its state from a given commit into what they call bundles. git only has git-format. can git-format be as self-describing as a bundle? you can't delete named branches from mercurial. i say, so what. we have an inactive branch. we merge uninteresting branches into there. hg branches -a then shows you the unmerged (active) branches. they're both good. it mostly depends on the way you and your team work.