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Comment by tl | Hacker News Reader

Aren't we missing the elephant in the room here?

Mercurial = Python-based = runs anywhere Python runs

Git = Unix-like systems only

Doesn't Python shelter a decent sized Windows community? (Free, more accessible than the Windows flavors of Perl / Ruby)

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When Unix-like goes so far as to include windows with MSys, what does it exclude? And, for windows users that don't like to type, there's tortoisegit (http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/), which appears to be generally functional.

Mercurial is still better supported under Windows. Anecdotal evidence: compare the Eclipse plug-ins (under Windows) for git and hg. (And before there's flak about Eclipse: it is a widely used tool, under Windows at least).

Git not working well on Windows is something that continues to tarnish its reputation even though that hasn't been the case for quite some time.

Curiously, this was part of the reason Python chose not to use Git even after extensive research. One would have thought they would have stumbled across any number of projects like msysgit that would have shown them otherwise.

I say this as a git user: msysgit works well, but that's not the same thing as working well on Windows. hq feels native on Windows in a way that git doesn't.

Having just installed hit on windows, the feeling I got was that there is msysgit, or running it on cygwin. Msysgit's homepage feels... Precarious, like it's part abandoned.

It does work, once you answer a question of which of three ways it should awkwardly integrate into your PATH, but within a cygwinesque bash shell.

So yeah, functional but nowhere near as smooth and seamless as python on windows is, or as one might pick up from your comment.

I seriously want to know. Have you actually used msysgit for any length of time on a relatively large project?

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