What are the strengths of Mercurial for you?

[Doug Philips]

On or about 2009/1/8 Arne Babenhauserheide indited:
>        What are the strengths of Mercurial for you?

- Distributed - Teams working on different continents. Utterly trivial to set up local clone redistribution points and backups.
- hg serve - instant salesman for showing core concepts, what history looks like, etc.
- zip/tar/etc. archives - Ability to give internal customers a URL and a button to click. No need to install any version control clients to just get a snapshot of our system and use it.
- TortoiseHG - I was the only one on my team who didn't use WinCVS; a command line only version control solution had no chance.
- Trivial install on Windows - TortoiseHG again. I can use the command line and only delve into the GUI when I need to help other team members, all from one install.
- Append only repo model - Even junior members of the team can play, and if they accidentally commit to the wrong repo, well, repo-life is append only, no worries, we just back up a few changesets, branch around them, and it doesn't take any significant time to recover.
- Cheap clones.
- Learning curve. Despite the immaturity of TortoiseHG and the rather diffuse and scattered Mercurial wiki, there isn't much to learn to be effective; within a particular (policy determined) workflow productivity doesn't take long to achieve.

        --Doug