GitHub would have won even if it were MercurialHub. It had a better user model of the problem to be solved than any other SaaS code forge, and it supported both open-source bazaar-style development and private enterprise. The gamification and social network features are KILLER.
Also, the Mercurial developers never had the built-in fan base of Linus Torvalds. Anyone who wanted to work on Linux had to use Git, so that was another major reason to learn (and stick with) Git.
This. Which basically means: no time to setup, no operations overhead, no administration required. This means, no dedicated team member needed who is the "admin" for version control, no dedicated infra required, etc. In the early 2000s when we were a team of 8 developers, one was a "ClearCase admin". He was a single point of contact for all things ClearCase (request him to create a new branch, add a new user, create a label, create a new repository and so on). He also had to ensure regular backups were done, the server was regularly patched, the disk had enough space. GitHub/Gitlab simply remove all of this just for a few dollars per user.
- But with mercurial branching where more like forks with different directories. Made me avoid that feature in web development work (that way I didn't have to fiddle with my webserver config every time I would have liked to create a branch)
- I recall having to deal with a bunch of gotchas around mercurial bookmarks (tags), like not being able to delete them, problems with sharing them with others, and things like that.
I was actively exploring different DVCS around that time, coming from a SVN background where I remember spending a lot of time fixing merge conflicts like a sucker. The one I liked, for its theoretical aspects, was darcs (as I was also leaning heavily in the Haskell ecosystem of the time).
Anyway, in short for me git overtook mercurial because it was easy for me to hop around multiple branches, pick off individual commits, and rebase commits (I was still pedantic about how I formatted my commits before a PR, nowadays, not so much).
That's bzr, not Mercurial. Mercurial has always had more advanced branches than Git.
I'm sure a lot has changed in that timespan, and maybe it was a bit more of a nuanced situation wrt branching, but the pain points are the things I can only vaguely recall at this point.
Mercurial did have one killer feature, and that was hginit.com. Git's documentation was terrible for a long time. I would send programmers used to old fashion version control to hginit all the time, even when I was teaching Git.
Because Mercurial was (Still is?) hopelessly slow on large repositories.
- The fact that it was Linus developing it
- The fact that it was released just after Git
- It's pretty much like Git and evolved to be usable like Git
- Git had way more advanced tooling and still does to this day
Why would you use git if you could use Mercurial instead?