FWIW, I think that the tendency to push things into extensions is a huge net negative for hg consistency and learnability.
VCSes are complex tools and it takes a little while for people to understand the data model and how it maps to the command line UI. This means that people new to a tool — or just new to a particular project's workflow — will often have "how do I do X?" type questions. With git helping people is pretty easy; you just sit down with them and go through the set of commands they need to achieve what they want, explaining the operations on the tree along the way (if necessary). It's even the sort of thing that you can do over irc without too much difficulty.
When using hg there is a whole extra level of complexity because the default setup isn't actually suitable for use in real projects; to get something useful you first have to enable a bunch of extensions. So given a random user with unknown configuration it's hard to know what commands are even available to them without diving into a configuration file, possibly downloading some random python scripts from the internet, and so on. For example the Mozilla source tree has a whole mercurial setup script that configures about a dozen extensions, a few of which are providing useful Mozilla-specific functionality (e.g. bugzilla integration), but most of which are plugging holes in the hg featureset.
I also find if baffling that, given git exists, when hg developers integrate ideas from git wholesale — something that is on the whole positive — (e.g. bookmarks as an implementation of local branching), they conspire to do so in such a way that the experience is jarring for people moving from git. To me it seems obvious that if you are coming second in a space with strong network effects, you don't go out of your way to make it painful for people to switch.
I get the impression that at least some mercurial fans expect it to win in the enterprise, citing organizations like Facebook optimising it to work with their giant repositories. But it isn't clear to me that there's much trickle-down effect from there; most smaller projects simply don't have that much source to control, or the ability to enforce the kind of homogenous environment that forgives many of the shortcomings of mercurial's UX.
VCSes are complex tools and it takes a little while for people to understand the data model and how it maps to the command line UI. This means that people new to a tool — or just new to a particular project's workflow — will often have "how do I do X?" type questions. With git helping people is pretty easy; you just sit down with them and go through the set of commands they need to achieve what they want, explaining the operations on the tree along the way (if necessary). It's even the sort of thing that you can do over irc without too much difficulty.
When using hg there is a whole extra level of complexity because the default setup isn't actually suitable for use in real projects; to get something useful you first have to enable a bunch of extensions. So given a random user with unknown configuration it's hard to know what commands are even available to them without diving into a configuration file, possibly downloading some random python scripts from the internet, and so on. For example the Mozilla source tree has a whole mercurial setup script that configures about a dozen extensions, a few of which are providing useful Mozilla-specific functionality (e.g. bugzilla integration), but most of which are plugging holes in the hg featureset.
I also find if baffling that, given git exists, when hg developers integrate ideas from git wholesale — something that is on the whole positive — (e.g. bookmarks as an implementation of local branching), they conspire to do so in such a way that the experience is jarring for people moving from git. To me it seems obvious that if you are coming second in a space with strong network effects, you don't go out of your way to make it painful for people to switch.
I get the impression that at least some mercurial fans expect it to win in the enterprise, citing organizations like Facebook optimising it to work with their giant repositories. But it isn't clear to me that there's much trickle-down effect from there; most smaller projects simply don't have that much source to control, or the ability to enforce the kind of homogenous environment that forgives many of the shortcomings of mercurial's UX.