Interestingly I’m having less success on the Mac with Mercurial, the free & open source GUIs really aren’t very good so far – TortoiseHG hasn’t been ported completely yet, Murky and MacMercurial cover too small a slice of the functionality to be a primary tool. In contrast GitX seems quite rich. I’m still keeping an open mind, let’s see how this plays out in the round.

Here’s my other non-scientific observation: of the projects that choose Git, the majority of them seem to be Linux-focussed (Qt is one of the exceptions, but that’s the trend I’m seeing: http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitProjects). It makes sense given that Git runs best on Linux, and that it regards Windows and non-Unix filesystems as second-class citizens that either need (slower) wrappers (Cygwin/MSYS) or won’t work at all (FAT). That, along with the obscurity of some of the commands is what’s concerning me about using Git for my projects right now.

If we remove their specific criteria, like easier migration from Perforce and in-house knowledge, it looks like Mercurial is the overall winner.

But read it yourself.

Funnily enough, all the ‘serious’ analyses that I’ve come across so far where a single DVCS choice has been made, have come down on the side of Mercurial – never by much, but there have been the typical small things that have tipped it like Windows support and ease of re-training from CVS/SVN. I haven’t yet seen what I would consider a serious unbiased analysis that’s come down on the Git side yet. Anyone have any of those? All the pro-Git stuff I’ve read so far has been written by people with vested interests (like GitHub), or people who don’t care about Windows, or individal developers who like it because it’s cool. Are there any level-headed comparisons out there that felt Git was best that I should be reading?

In fact, I wasn’t aware that Google Code had picked Mercurial over Git, that’s pretty interesting. It appears they did so for much the same reasons I’m currently leaning that way.

When I get more time I’m going to play with some engineered examples of things I normally come across and see how easy Mercurial and Git make it. So far Mercurial is winning on what I’ve tried so far, as discussed in the 3 points above.