Mercurial popularity is stagnant

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Tue, 19 Aug 2014 08:26:17 -0400, /cowwoc/:

> I'll repeat my question: what can we do to turn
> this around? I'm not sure I buy the argument that blogging about
> Mercurial will close the gap.

I believe one of the biggest selling points, preventing Git users 
from trying out Mercurial is the handling of branches.  In a reply 
to the "Bookmarks usage survey" thread, Martin Geisler wrote 
<http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2014-April/046979.html>:

> I agree completely -- this is also the major problem I saw when we tried
> to use bookmarks for real in my previous job.
>
> Being unable to delete them in a coordinated fashion makes them more of
> a nuisance than a help. I believe this would quickly become a #1
> priority if bookmarks were used in main or crew, but alas... :)
>
> I've been using Git daily since December and the namespace it uses helps
> a lot here...

If only Mercurial bookmarks could support a mode which closely 
resembles the behavior of Git branches, many established Git 
workflows could be directly mapped and executed with Mercurial. 
There's nothing wrong with the current Mercurial branching options, 
but providing one which is missing, and which gets used mostly (and 
exclusively) with Git is a must have in my opinion.

-- 
Stanimir