[pierrebai]

I find the Mercurial way improves codebase hygiene: do your dirty stuff in a clone repository. If you allow rebase, people will mess up and create ugly histories. Mercurial's lack of rebasing is a plus: it's a tool-enforced discipline of working in cloned repository and only bringing clean, compilable, executable code back into the real repository.

[npsimons]

As a firm believer in mechanism not policy, I find that Mercurial, much like Python, tries to force its users to the "one true way", which is assumed to be the "best" and "correct" way to do something, when in reality, it's just needlessly constraining. You want to enforce policy? That's entirely possible with git. It's just not turned on by default because not everyone needs it; it's a hammer looking for nails.

And it's perfectly possible to mess up and create ugly histories without rebase; that's exactly one of the prime use cases for rebase - cleaning up ugly histories. You want me to clone a clean repo from master and try applying pieces of my patch from scratch? Screw that noise! Even with the speed of git clone, I'd much rather pick, squash and rewrite commit messages in rebase.