two three ways in which mercurial needs to impove

two three places mercurial needs to improve to better capture the dvcs audience

1. bi-directional svn integration
- the ability to capture the svn->dvcs audience with git-svn is one of the most important reasons git is gaining the userbase it is
- based on some irc discussion, I’m not sure if scripting mq is adequate to deal with rebasing, might need additional development here

2. first-class local branches
- not having to navigate multiple working trees fits my brain better
- currently the best option is lbranch, but it’s sparse on documentation.
- while the ‘hg way’ is creating a new directory, this rubs people the wrong way

3. update: one more: sourceshare isn’t github

These two three areas will be critical in determining the git/hg pieshare in the future.

When I first jumped the non-distributed ship it was after git started paying attention to usability (1.5.0 iirc). I got spoiled with the cheap local branching and dcommit. I like hg. It’s simple, portable, extensible, generally has better guis and integration, it stands up to git with speed (beats it in some measures) and when well-integrated with trac it’s quite nice for development.

That being said, I’m not a loyal hg user, in 6 months it will be more clear which the better choice is.