It’s old news, but, I just recently learned that Python has decided to use Mercurial as their DVCS of choice. Guido gives some of his reasoning here. Seems like they made a choice that fits well for them. It’s sort of obvious to me they would choose something written in Python (Mercurial) over something that’s not (git), all other things being equal.

That said, Mercurial and git differ fairly significantly in my mind. I’ve been using git for nearly a year now and I really like it. It’s made my job easier, faster, and better. I only started truly working with Mercurial a few days ago and I’m surprised that there is a bit of a learning curve.

I pretty much expected to just know how to use Mercurial because of my familiarity with git. The whole DVCS thing didn’t bother me, so just learn a few commands and things should be fine. However, I was thrown off track pretty quickly by a feature in Mercurial called the patch queue. I still don’t know exactly how to use it, but I don’t need it right now. I did learn that.

Citing no specific examples, it feels to me that Mercurial and git differ pretty significantly, but they are both quality version control systems that simply fit different people’s workflows and needs.