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HG / Mercurial

• Pros
  • Great set of client-tools
  • History is absolutely sacred
    • Maintains a guaranteed accurate history
    • No modification of history allowed
  • Quick learning curve due to commonality with SVN commands and straight-forward functionality
  • Runs cleanly under all operating systems
  • Mercurial does not require repository maintenance.
• Cons
  • N-way merges are accomplished by performing N-1 merges
    • Not necessarily a con, but worth noting
  • Sacred history may lend itself to a less-clean-looking history
  • Apparently, doesn't play nicely with maven release plugin
• Notes
  • Kiln would allow each developer to choose their own DVCS (HG / Git)
  • Performance has shown to be mostly comparable between DVCS systems
  • Mercurial has provided rebase support since version 1.1
  • Mercurial is implemented mostly in Python (with a small amount of C), with an extension API that allows third parties to enhance Mercurial via custom Python modules.

Git

• Pros
  • Allows N-way merges in one changeset
    • Although this could lead to some confusion as to where certain changes came from.
  • GitHub is pretty much the only real solution for opensource projects nowadays
  • Ability to modify source history does allow for a "clean" history, although potentially inaccurate
  • There is a //much// larger community surrounding Git due to its history with the Linux kernel and it's more recent marriage with GitHub
• Cons
  • Exposes the ability to modify source history
    • Some people see this as a "pro".
    • There is record of people blowing away months of work due to a bad command
  • Lack of client tools when compared to HG
  • Steep learning curve
    • Lack of easy to use client tools
    • Terminology even further removed from SVN than HG
  • Linux heritage lends Windows compatibility to be less than ideal
    • Official way to run under Windows is using cygwin
    • Performance has shown to be more sluggish under Windows
  • Git requires periodic maintenance of repositories (i.e. git-gc)
• Notes
  • Kiln would allow each developer to choose their own DVCS (HG / Git)
  • Performance has shown to be mostly comparable between DVCS systems
  • Git was originally a large number of shell scripts and unix commands implemented in C. Over time, a common library that shared between commands has been developed, and many of the commands have been built into the main git executable.