hg clean ?

Actually, wait. hg up doesn't require network access. Maybe you're thinking of hg pull -u or svn up

So you should also read the manual to know about. There no such thing as "intuitive" in VCS world. Looks like most of commentators confuse intuitiveness with familiarity.

Don't get me wrong I appreciate mercurial devs did a tremendous work to hide DVCS under SVN-like ("simple" hah) interface. But every non-standard thing requires manual reading.

> hg up doesn't require network access.

So it's like `git checkout` and doesn't cover all breakage cases.

Not sure how to answer that, but sure, I can imagine plenty of ways in which a local repo could be screwed up that might require a strip or just a complete fresh pull. "All breakage cases" is pretty broad.

My personal reasons for liking mercurial is some pretty amazing tooling (hg absorb, hg fa --deleted, revsets/filesets) combined with a friendly commandline with fairly sensible defaults.

Dunno what scenario it would fail on. You can also clone a local repo as long as you didn't mangle the .hg dir