Popularity itself is an often overlooked feature. When trying to sell the use of a version control system to others (peers, coworkers, bosses, etc. Or more difficult if you are trying to make an institutional change) you are already in a better position with git than you are with mercurial.

If all mercurial is bringing to the table is being a bit more pleasant, I am still going to pass over it for that reason.

I can sympathize with the difficulty of persuading others. But consider this not-so-far-fetched example: if you're choosing an open-source database, you would choose MySQL based on popularity instead of PostgreSQL, which I would argue in most cases is a mistake--which you'll likely have to live with for years.

That's not a fair comparison. Mercurial is better than git in certain aspects (mainly command line experience) but git by itself is a solid content tracker. It has an extremely simple data model and it's rock solid. As someone else said in this thread, git has no separate notion of 'branch', 'tag' like Mercurial. In a way, git is actually like PostgreSQL, a solid piece of software which you can trust.

It's more than just command line stuff; Google did an extensive comparison that more people should look at: http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis

That comparison is over 4 years old. Google code now supports git, and most of the arguments against git are either spurious ("git history isn't sacred!")[1] or have been improved since then (better windows support, smart http protocol, single user-visible binary, etc.).

[1] dvcs history locally should not be sacred, because rewriting experimental branches is necessary for clarity and to avoid polluting the main repository branches. dvcs history on a central repo can be made sacred with git by disabling non-ff commits and disabling deletes.

In addition to the points that solutionyogi raises, I don't think that is a very good comparison when you consider the differences in commercial and private RDBMS', and the differences between commercial centralized VCS and open source DVCS.

DVCS (either mercurial or git) seems to be a much more exotic concept for people unfamiliar with DVCS than MySQL/PostgreSQL is to those only familiar with, say, Oracle RDBMS.

I'm not a DBA though, so maybe I am wildly wrong with that thought.

(Also this comparison maps back to the topic incorrectly, in that I obviously greatly prefer PostgreSQL in the comparison, but I greatly prefer git in the other scenario).

What do you like about bazaar in contrast to mercurial or git?