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by BeetleB 3085 days ago
Although I'm not a power user, I believe mercurial can do pretty much most things that git does - including editing history. They just make the easy stuff easy and make the advanced stuff harder - as opposed to git which puts them all on an equal footing.

For history editing, people use the evolve extension in mercurial. It'll likely never become part of the default mercurial because there is a small chance of breaking backward compatibility.

Even before the evolve extension, there were ways to modify mercurial history.

Yes, mercurial docs leave something to be desired. But the actual interface is much cleaner than git's, and is much more newbie friendly, without really losing anything sophisticated.

As another user said in another comment:

>It's easier to transition to Mercurial but once you find you need to dive deep, it's just about as complex as git. Git seems to throw you in the deep end immediately which I do think is more of a blessing than a curse but there are times when it doesn't quite feel that way.
1 comments
yebyen 3085 days ago
Thanks for telling, I found the rebase extension on my own but I don't know what Mercurial users are using unless you tell me and I would not have found the evolve extension on my own :D

I will probably check it out, to be fair it seems unlikely to "unseat the incumbent" git, but I've sampled my fair share of VCS including Git, SVN, CVS, RCS, Fossil, and have never really made it around to Mercurial. None of those others that I know of recently seem to have a vocal following, other than both of Git and Mercurial now, I guess.

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BeetleB 3084 days ago
>I will probably check it out, to be fair it seems unlikely to "unseat the incumbent" git

It will not, as they are more or less the same. People already on git have no good reason to switch. The only real benefit mercurial has is being friendlier. It may prove beneficial for new teams, but these days most people are already familiar with git and will put up with its pains (or rather, be oblivious to its pains).

Mostly an accident of history. If mercurial had initially gotten popular, I doubt anyone would be using git today.

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