Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Useful links for understanding Mercurial and Git

The basics

Comparisons

While the link below isn’t really a comparison so much as a set of suggestions for git, it happens to highlight some of the things I think Mercurial does right:

http://nubyonrails.com/articles/five-features-from-mercurial-that-would-make-git-suck-less

Unfortunately, almost all of the rest of the comparisons that show up on Google at the time of this writing are significantly out of date.  There are some good comparisons which enumerate what used to be valid reasons for choosing one system over the other, however, times are changing rapidly for these systems.  The following, while a bit out of date, are still relevant comparisons that have good highlights of the systems:

I list the Python PEP primarily because it contains some good workflow discussions.  The first two are a bit more up-to-date.

The one that reflects my own reasons for choosing Mercurial best is this:

http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2007/12/30/why_mercurial/

I believe git repositories automatically optimize periodically now, so that’s less of a difference.  Mercurial now has hgsubversion to work with Subversion repositories as well.  Mercurial supports not only named branches within a repository but also git-style bookmarks, which differs from the article here too.

Finally, a pretty up-to-date and under-the-hood technical comparison of how they work is at Stack Overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1598759/git-and-mercurial-compare-and-contrast