Then rakudo switched to git, and I was forced to learn it to some extent. Now I'm sold to it, because it does all the offline working that I need, local branching, diffs and blame annotations in no time (that SVN would only give me with internet access and a minute of waiting), rebase etc.

I do see that it's rather confusing at first, and not very easy to learn.

I have not experimented with Mercurial or any other distributed version control system (except a bit playing with darcs and svk, both which didn't really appeal to me at that time) so I can't really comment on them, but I'm pretty sure that distributed version control systems are the way to go - which one exactly is really up to personal preference.

++. I've had--am having; not quite to cruising speed yet--the same experience. Not easy to jump into. Really not. "WTF are they talking about, Git sucks," not. But the more I get it, the more I really like it. Powerful and quick once you get over some of the conceptual differences from SVN/CVS. It's also been around long enough at this point that most "How do I..." Google queries turn up an answer from someone who had the same hurdle and got over it. I don't know Hg but I do know what little of Perforce I was once forced to use made me :(

I don't know Hg but I do know what little of Perforce I was once forced to use made me :(

Yeah, I must admit that Perforce is not that friendly. I did a lot of work related to it like writing some automatic branching stuff around p4 commands for example. But I think it'll be hard to do anything complicated with the help of `p4 help` or Googling around. Luckily we had the perforce book in the office. Does not have a 100% coverage but good enough :)

Of course if I wanted to contribute to a project that was already using Git or Hg I'd be willing to give a try, but for my own projects I prefer something maximally reliable.

-sam

I'm using SVN all the time but I gave git a try and the ease with which you change any working directory on any machine in a repository (allowing reverting, etc) is such a huge plus I decided to switch to git for all new projects.

I don't claim Git is better than SVN or Hg (as I have never tried them). But $WORK uses Git; it works well at $WORK; it does what I want for my personal projects, so I have no reason to learn something else as well.

So, I guess my reason is "Since I already know Git, and Git does what I need". Oh, and I probably don't use more than 10% of the features Git has, so whether Git or Hg (or SVN) has more features isn't interesting for me anyway. If I had to learn SVN or Hg for $WORK instead of Git, I'd probably be using it now.

I really haven't experimented with anything but Git yet, and that's because:

• git-svn works really nicely, so it fairly easy to work in Git with $WORK's svn server.
• GitHub is brilliant. The UI is really nice and really helps explain Git's branching system of commits to people new to branching repositories.
• Having code I want to poke around with already up on GitHub is very convenient. Apart from Rakudo and perl6-examples, Test-More and Email-Sender are already there, and ripe for the branching.

My only complaint: unlike SVN, TortoiseGit isn't good enough for non-programmer usage just yet. The Windows Git GUI is much better, but with TortoiseSVN my non-programming workmates immediately understood how it worked. Git, with all its local/remote branching and whatnot, is a whole lot more complicated. Still, easy branching is an advantage hard to overlook, so I'll stick with Git and GitHub for now.

That said, the various distributed VCs are more or less equivalent. Choose the one that's cheap, fast, and convenient to you.

I use git because it maps to my internal logic nicely. Repeated attempts in the past to work with $version_control_system_dujour always fizzled. Git just works.

Perhaps credit is due to those other systems for getting me familiar with the concepts.

So when by chance I listened to Randall Schwartz git talk I "fell in love" with git. This might be because Randall is just a good salesman or maybe because git is really that good.

Since then I have tested and played with git and read a lot of man pages and other documentation about it and I found that
1) I still love it and svn isn't in the same league really
2) in many ways git is easier than svn and if a beginner reads the tutorials first instead of getting lost in plumbing man pages he might come to the same conclusion. I have a much deeper understanding of git than I ever had with svn
3) I would probably like hg or bazaar too, but git already nailed the coffin for me. At the moment I see no reason to look further.

Git has no native (yeah yeah I know that msysgit thing) Windows port. So, hg is better.

You've got it backwards : git has no native windows support and it's a huge plus, it rules out windows users altogether :)