I'd say that with Phases[1] and Publishing vs. Non-Publishing Repositories[2] Mercurial is already ahead of Git in terms of safe history rewriting. Changeset Evolution is significantly more powerful than anything Git has to offer.

[1]: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Phases [2]: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/PublishingRepositories

For me, the extreme popularity of GitHub is the No. 1 reason to avoid it as I do not want to contribute to the centralization of the Web. Also I like Fossil's [fossil-scm.org] approach of integrating wiki and bug tracker into DVCS, which allows projects to be less dependent on hosting services.

Fossil's user base has yet to reach a critical mass, mercurial and git are at least widely used and plugins, and services exist. I wonder if darcs will become a viable option again.

For git there is ticgit, which is a tracker that lives as a git branch.

Its definitely great to have several tools available and see a really productive evolution for good version control systems.

There is no decentralized system yet for social networking:

Identity, Authentication, Privacy, Subscriptions, Notifications, Contacts, Invites etc.

That's what we're working on at Qbix

There's also Trac:

http://trac.edgewall.org

I definitely prefer hg but github has pretty much won war so I'm stuck with git. At the end of the day I'm not going to get religious about version control, I have vim for that :)

The hg-git plugin for mercurial actually makes working with github from hg quite smooth, although I admit my workflows are fairly straightforward.

https://hg-git.github.io/

Sadly bitbucket does not have very good support for features from "modern" mercurial like bookmarks and changeset evolution. Since most of their users are git users I don't think they are strongly motivated to shore up mercurial support.

Their devs hang out in #mercurial in Freenode and have been talking about how to implement Evolve on the bitbucket WUI.

Good to know! I'm looking forward to more news on that front.

If you haven't already, then you can go vote on this issue: https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/6710/enable-exchange... -- and ask your collegues to do so too! :-)

The Bitbucket devs are nice guys and have said that they do listen to issue feedback like this.

The advantage of changeset evolution is obvious to me. But as a longtime Mercurial user, I don't grok the benefit of bookmarks. Do you have a simple example where a bookmark is more useful than a permanent branch?

The teams I work with don't like the permanence of mercurial named branches. Bookmarks are a nice lightweight alternative way to name a short-lived head rather than creating a permanent tag for a two-line commit. Before bookmarks we used anonymous heads.