I just got out of a point-by-point comparison of Git and Mercurial, presented by one developer from each project (simultaneously). Both are DVCSs that are popular among Free and Open Source Software projects.

The presentation pretty much confirmed my existing convictions about the two projects: they are extremely comparable in terms of the features provided, though of course there are differences in the approach that can make a big difference for people’s preferences. But the major difference seems to be that Mercurial has significantly better documentation, is easier to use overall (at least for the most common tasks), and runs better on Windows.

The better performance on Windows was the main reason I chose to migrate GNU Wget to Mercurial rather than Git. The ease-of-use, and similarity to Subversion, is why I prefer to use it in my own personal projects, as well.

When I had to choose a DVCS for GNU Screen, on the other hand, I went with Git. This was mainly because I believed it to be essentially equal in power to Mercurial (which I feel was confirmed by this presentation), was of no use to Windows users (at least, other than ones running a Unix environment such as Cygwin), and would be the more familiar DVCS to the folks most likely to be interested in developing it (several other important GNU projects, such as coreutils, gnulib, autoconf and automake, are managed with Git).