Mercurial: finally as usable as git
I have always preferred Git to Mercurial and the main reason was Git having lightweight local branches. My typical work scenario with Git is: create a branch, code a task, merge the branch into the “master” branch. If anything happens along the way (urgent issue, for instance) – I can easily switch to a new local branch preserving the current changes in their own branch and do the work immediately.
Mercurial does have the Bookmarks extension that provides local branching. But it is very different from Git’s local branches: bookmarks are rather pointers to a common change history than isolated branches. For instance, all the commits inside a bookmark are automatically shared on “push” and “pull” with other repositories.
Anyway, since I had to use Mercurial for one of my projects (http://www.developers.org.ua), I had to find the solution: the Tasks extension. Now I can easily switch between branches working on whatever tasks I need for the moment.
Now I am very optimistic regarding Mercurial taking into account that it is Python-based and I can (easily?) develop my own extensions.
For more details on how Bookmarks work in Mercurial and what are the possible alternatives to the Tasks extension please see the discussion in the Mercurial newsgroup.
