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Comment by rogerbinns | Hacker News Reader

I've also been using Git and Mercurial for years. Git is the only one where I have experienced data loss, not to mention obtuse error messages that I could only end up fixing by doing a reset.

Under the hood the two systems are very close. What differs is the interface, defaults and "taste". I think the Mercurial ones are a closer match for perpetual intermediates and smaller projects/teams while Git's choices are a closer match for expert users and larger teams/projects.

Use the best tool for the job and that closest matches the work being done and the team at hand. There is not one perfect answer.

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Best tool for the job, can't agree more with that. We have a team that insists on using git when:

- it is just a small team (less than 5 devs)

- there is no github, just a locally hosted gitorious instance (proprietary project)

- the lead dev who picks git is using Windows half the time

- there are less technical people who need commit rights (e.g. changing reports layout, changing CSS, etc)

I believe the "git already won" mentality (which is very apparent in the comments of both OP article and HN) get these people to pick git over mercurial. And once they become familiar with git, they won't let go, due to the sunk cost of learning gitology[1].

[1] http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/on-gitology/

Regarding your link, the author lost me at:

"Git encourages micro-management, and git’s users end up loving this micro-management (and blog about it, and write books, and have conferences, and so on ad-nauseum). This is characteristic of the perversion that git promotes, focussing on details instead of getting work done."

What does the author know about how much work any of those people get done? But I'm glad he wrote that; it made me feel much better about writing the rest off as a rant.

Regarding sunk costs, that's true of pretty much any sufficiently complex tool or technology. You could make the same case with Emacs vs. vi, or pretty much any programming language, API, or framework.

Gitology is definitely a sunk cost, because of all the concepts you have to learn which are not applicable anywhere else. Here's a good example of what happens when a programmer learns git as the first DVCS:

http://groups.google.com/group/wtforms/msg/8ffaf89083f775a4

You might want to google that name before making the claim.

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