[qbasic_forever]

Git didn't exist until Linus Torvalds sat down and hacked it out in a few weeks during 2005. I remember using SDL back in '99 to play with game development on Windows 98. So the short answer is, git wasn't even an idea in its creators head when SDL was around and thriving.

IMHO when you see a design decision that seems odd to you, it's a good opportunity to investigate the entire context around that design, rather than pepper the devs/issues/comment threads/etc. with pointed questions, "Why did you do X when Y is now clearly better??".

[jrochkind1]

However, Mercurial also didn't exist before 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial#History

i would guess you are right, though, that at the point SDL chose Mercurial (I don't know when), git hadn't achieved the market domination over mercurial it now has.

[mrpippy]

SDL didn't use Mercurial until 2010. They used Subversion from 2006-2010 [1], and CVS before that [2]. A project on its 4th version control system!

[1]: http://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php?t=6047 [2]: https://discourse.libsdl.org/t/sdl-in-subversion/13289

[qbasic_forever]

Again, I will restate what I said. Follow the context of the decisions (as you have already done) instead of demanding people explain it.

[TonyTrapp]

That doesn't really answer the question though as both Mercurial and Git were released in 2005.