The way I read it, and the document discussing the VCS switch (PEP 374), was that the Big Three DVCSes (git, hg, bzr) were essentially all just fine. Git is the

The way I read it, and the document discussing the VCS switch (PEP 374), was that the Big Three DVCSes (git, hg, bzr) were essentially all just fine. Git is the fastest and hairiest, Bazaar is the slowest and cutest, and Mercurial covers both ends fairly well without introducing any glaring flaws. All three systems have big, well-known projects actively running on them, with developers singing about how much better their respective choices are compared to the SVN or CVS systems. Any choice would have been fine; it was fairly obvious. Python has a history of fussy programmers. Remember the web framework wars of a few years ago? Everyone complained that there were too many choices, picked favorites to champion and nitpicked at the alternatives (which were not actually bad), and nobody could sleep at night because there were alternatives and nobody knew which one was right. Then Guido announced that Django was right, and the lost souls breathed a sigh of relief and did the Django tutorial, and the folks who were already using Turbogears and Pylons productively continued to do so. Django isn't necessarily the best Python web framework for everyone, but it's rarely a bad choice. That's pretty much what happened this year with DVCSes. The Biopython project was stalled on a CVS-to-SVN transition for over a year, for example, until some grenades were thrown and tears were shed and finally Git was picked because a few people liked it, nobody really had a problem with it and all the other options were triggering nasty blog posts. Case closed. Sometimes we just need a quick slap to shut us up.