I haven’t used Mercurial, but I came across it. One comparison somebody ran had git outperforming it on speed and storage space, but single reports like that I take with a grain of salt. More evidence is needed.

They seem to make collaboration easier and would better facilitate code reviews (I wrote a tool that allows us to easily do code reviews now – it simply rewrites all of your CVS/Root files w/ the reviewer’s name and creates a network share for the reviewer to examine all of your changes).

They may also make managing our branches easier – but I never actually tested a system out to make sure.

At the time, I was investigating Mercurial. I’ve heard many good things about it. Sun Microsystems switched to recently I think (relatively speaking – maybe a little over a year ago?).

Anyhow, there is no support at work for any new version control system. Our only such champion left (John). Our organization is large enough that it is too difficult to roll it out in scale. And management would like engineering skills to be fungible – which means not having to learn new tools when moving from one team to another. So we stick with CVS (or Microsoft Team… about which I’ve heard nothing good – especially regarding the price!).

I think that Universities who still teach students how to write HTML have to stop do that, and use that time to learn students about Git!

I’m enjoying using Git at home for my Ruby based chess/shogi project. Already, I’ve used its easy branching to create a new branch when I reached a crossroads point where I suspected I needed to alter my approach forward, but didn’t want to absolute commit to it by abandoning my old approach.

I’ve definitely noticed the speed improvements over other tools and cannot emphasize how much easier it is start a project with version control in Git since you don’t have to fiddle around with setting up a proper network based repository until you get to the point where others are collaborating.