Which should you use for a distributed version control system (DVCS) – git or mercurial? That was the question taken up recently by two opposing blog posts on Atlassian’s blog:
Admittedly this is a bit of a “religious” issue with adherents on either side being extremely passionate about the topic. In my own case, my writing here (as well as my Github account) definitely show that I fall down on the side of git… but I’m also always interested to learning more about the various tools.
The two blog posts are written by passionate advocates for each tool and so naturally have that flavor. Regardless, they make for interesting reading. I don’t see myself switching to Mercurial any time soon… but it’s interesting to see the pros and cons of each. We still don’t have the “perfect” tool… but will we ever?
Given that I started working with version control systems back when RCS was the only option I had… and then CVS was a huge step forward… and then SVN was viewed as excellent… all I can say is that we’ve come a loooonnngg way and it’s greatto see both git and mercurial out there.
P.S. I should note that both of these articles are part of Atlassian’s “DVCS Guide” that has some other useful pieces about why distributed version control systems are worth investigating and using.
Interesting to see that the White House is sponsoring its first ever code sprint… from 