You’re right that the time I spent learning git, I also spent learning how distributed SCMs worked. However, I really find git’s syntax very strange. Perhaps, that was my biggest gripe with it.

Mercurial had a familiar syntax, which allowed me to perform the basic operations without requiring any prior knowledge of distributed SCMs. This allowed me to have a functional repository, while allowing me to incrementally learn the additional features that a distributed SCMs provides.

Well, I’ll be sure to ask you whenever I have a question regarding git

In this case, learning Mercurial was easier just because you had already learnt git

I’m using git for my own repository too and, after I understood the principles, I am enjoying it very much!

Thanks for your comments. It’s great to know there is a “git remote” command. I haven’t had much experience with branches on Mercurial, since I am using it primarily as a personal repository though, while git has been with large open-source projects. The scale and complexity of my usage differ vastly between the two SCMs. So, I would say my experience using git and Mercurial is indeed very biased.

• setting up remote-tracking branches is now as simple as using “git remote” command. Note that in Mercurial tracking branches are IIRC unnamed by default.
• an equivalent of “hg addremove” is “git add -u”.
• .gitignore rules are specified using wildcards (globbing), but allow also for recursive match on basename, and allow to exclude some pattern from being ignored
• “git checkout –track -b somebranch origin/somebranch” does create and checkout _local_ branch ’somebranch’, mirroring remote-tracking branch ’somebranch’ at remote ‘origin’, and setting up that currect repository is fetched from, and conrrect branch is merged when using “git pull” when on this branch.