Not as many as svn or cvs for sure. That's part of why it became popular. There was a job title "merge master" - literally there were people who's job was to handle merging in various feature branches. If you didn't have this person you risked days or even weeks of downtime because no one could use the central server without risk of making the situation worse. You would regularly open a file and find your work had been stomped on because one person added a small doc fix in their version of a file and merged it after your work went in, but the vcs didn't really merge, it just overwrote.

I'm not saying it can't be better - clearly it can.

Just pointing out that one person spending a little time unfucking a branch is massively superior to everyone not being able to work because that same person fucked up everyone's branches.

hg up --clean

i dont know why mercurial doesn't get more love.

It was loved. I blame all the platforms dropping support for it.

Github really is git's best PR.

mercurial was pretty nice, and if you have a "beginner developer team", mercurial is probably my recommendation. but how git does branching is just better in a way you just can't get past, once you use it. Luckily it's usually pretty simple to start with hg and move to git at a later date.

Hg branching makes more sense to me. You can update to any changeset and then just start coding and it will naturally branch. If you want something more permanent you can create a named branch. If you can't find your unnamed branches you can bookmark or tag them.

hg is indeed the better tool. Just as microkernels are the better kernel design. By existing and working (which is no small feat), Linux obliterates both alternatives in the zeitgeist. This is, of course, the great downside to "worse is better".

We used hg when I started at my current position.

From a developer stand point the experience was better but all the tooling and integrations are git based so we switched.

As I remember `hg up` requires network access. What if you break a repo offline?

hg clean ?

Actually, wait. hg up doesn't require network access. Maybe you're thinking of hg pull -u or svn up

So you should also read the manual to know about. There no such thing as "intuitive" in VCS world. Looks like most of commentators confuse intuitiveness with familiarity.

Don't get me wrong I appreciate mercurial devs did a tremendous work to hide DVCS under SVN-like ("simple" hah) interface. But every non-standard thing requires manual reading.

> hg up doesn't require network access.

So it's like `git checkout` and doesn't cover all breakage cases.

Not sure how to answer that, but sure, I can imagine plenty of ways in which a local repo could be screwed up that might require a strip or just a complete fresh pull. "All breakage cases" is pretty broad.

My personal reasons for liking mercurial is some pretty amazing tooling (hg absorb, hg fa --deleted, revsets/filesets) combined with a friendly commandline with fairly sensible defaults.

Dunno what scenario it would fail on. You can also clone a local repo as long as you didn't mangle the .hg dir