Git does some very cool stuff, but I have to agree with Sean's assessment of the user interface, and that's the reason I prefer Mercurial. This is not so much an issue with PETSc developers, but I like that the interface to Mercurial is so clean and simple that I can get collaborators who are reticent version control system users to use it in a sensible way. I've gotten many colleagues who were using SVN to convert to Mercurial once I showed it to them and they realized that it is *easier* to use than SVN even though its capabilities are much more sophisticated. I find that Mercurial sits in a "sweet spot" for me between simplicity of use and sophistication of features.
--Richard On 1/9/13 11:03 PM, Sean Farley wrote: > [...] > > * user interface > - git has notoriously had a bad interface and even when I think some > command will do what I want, it somehow messes up > - mercurial has a pretty clean interface for the most part (and more > importantly) makes typing shorter commands possible > > * speed > - tough to really say now that Bryan O'Sullivan's patches are in > mercurial and he's actively working on that front (for Facebook ? who > still uses subversion) > > * mutable history > - git decides this based on whether there is anything "pointing" > - mercurial decides what is rewritable by the phase (public, draft, secret) > > This last bit of mutable history is what I've found to be an > indispensable workflow. I haven't seen any comparison of this > mercurial feature with modern git (to be fair, it's with a develop > version of mercurial). -- Richard Tran Mills, Ph.D. Computational Earth Scientist | Joint Assistant Professor Hydrogeochemical Dynamics Team | EECS and Earth & Planetary Sciences Oak Ridge National Laboratory | University of Tennessee, Knoxville E-mail: rmills at ornl.gov V: 865-241-3198 http://climate.ornl.gov/~rmills