[develop7]

Your rebase-based workflow is easily achievable with Mercurial. And there's even --outgoing switch in histedit.

> Histedit extension which is meant to provide this feature has warnings all over the place

Ignore them — you do know, what are you doing, right?

> changeset backups written to locations in the working tree

That's not true. Backups are written to .hg/strip-backup directory, which isn't tracked.

[Perseids]

> Ignore them — you do know, what are you doing, right?

No, I don't :). I heavily rely on my CVS to never loose any data and to be able to go back to a previous state whenever I need to. This works great with Git's reflog.

> That's not true. Backups are written to .hg/strip-backup directory, which isn't tracked.

I stand corrected then. Maybe I'm mixing that up with amend or revert? I last used mercurial 9 months ago, but believe to remember there was some command that left .orig files lying around and that if you applied a history rewrite command several times those backups were overwritten with the new backups and you weren't able to come back all the way.

[develop7]

> to be able to go back to a previous state whenever I need to

as I've said, old commits are backed up.

> This works great with Git's reflog.

except git reflog is cleaned on git gc

Not mentioning http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangesetEvolution feature is being in development.

> there was some command that left .orig files lying around

Only way .orig files may pop up is failure to replay rebased commit(s). No way these are backups — their purpose is to make user able to fix things and continue.