I’ve been playing with Mercurial lately, after having previously tried Git out for a few weeks.
I must say, I prefer Mercurial, though I would be hard-pressed to quantify that into some kind of this-feature-is-better-than-that-feature list (apart from the most obvious advantage that it’s cross platform, of course). For some reason, it just feels right. Which is weird, I know.
This is not to say Mercurial is perfect. Because there are a few niggles. The one that jumps immediately to mind is the fact that no matter where you are in a repository tree, hg status presents the list of changed files from the repository root — not the current context directory. So if you then copy and paste a file name (with path) from that status list, to commit a single change, you get an error. Because subdir/filename does not exist when you’re already in subdir. Small niggle, but there it is.
Second problem I’ve had recently: hg rm file, where file is the last in the directory. Mercurial appears to remove the directory. If you then try to commit, it throws its hands up in horror. Again, only a minor annoyance.
Apart from that, I like Mercurial enough to migrate all my other personal projects off subversion. I’d also be really interested to see how it handled a really large enterprise project, since subversion (at work) is groaning under the strain of handling that project. Chances of that happening are minimal, and would require replicating almost 2 years worth of commits, to really test it, but it would be interesting to see the results…..
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