On: Bitbucket Joins Atlassian

[Timothee]

Does that mean you were going from hg to git? Any specific reason for that? Any opinion on the two?

(I've been using git for a little bit but wonder if Mercurial could be more powerful but less popular, and that I'd be missing out)

[dmpayton → Timothee]

I initially decided on HG because I'm a Python developer, and a lot of other people in the Python community seem to recommend it (plus, HG is written in Python). Bitbucket had a free plan with a private repo, so I signed up. About the same time, my employer started migrating from Subversion to Git.

For me, the two features I miss most in HG are the staging area and cheap local branching. There plugins that give you rough equivalents, but I haven't used them and it's much nicer to have what you need out of the box.

[mgeisler → dmpayton]

Mercurial does come with everything out of the box in the form of standard extensions that you just need to enable if you need them:

* mq is a "staging area on steroids": http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/08/a-git-users-guide-to-mercu...

* bookmarks lets you name your cheaper-than-Git branches: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/02/mercurial-workflows-branch...

[dmpayton → mgeisler]

Thanks for the tips! MQ and bookmarks look like they could be a solid fill-in for Gits staging area and cheap branching. I'll definitely look more into them.

[stonemetal → dmpayton]

How is Git's branching Cheaper than HG's? The only major difference I know of is an almost immaterial implementation detail.