I adopted mercurial when git was "painful" to use. It seems as though this has changed, but I see no compelling reason to switch just because all the Rails kids think git's cool right now.
> Mercurial's metaphor for local branching is awkward.
That may be true (honestly, I don't know), but I haven't yet needed to maintain different branches of projects I'm working on and so it's a non-issue at this point. If at some point it becomes an issue, and I find Mercurial lacking, then of course I'll take a closer look at git, who probably does it more appropriately.
Mercurial also has cheap local branching, though to my understanding it is easier to close out branches that have been merged back in / abandoned on git. The mercurial developers are working on this, though.
I'm trying very hard to like git, being a Rails kid coming from the svn world. Still, besides the kickass merging, everything else seems ass-backwards.
Remote work especially is bonkers. Push/pull? Easy. Add/Delete remote branch? Off to google for me...
Under what OS, hardware platform, filesystem, project size, etc.?
Not knee-jerk arguing, genuinely curious. When I compared them on Windows and OpenBSD, I never had a speed difference of more than about 5% (not counting git db repacking), even with a project that had 40,000+ commits, 10+ very active branches, and about 2 GB of code + data.
Admittedly it was probably either the environment or the remote server causing the problem. I was running it under Cygwin on Vista, and it was a fairly huge project. I was running git under the same environment for the same thing (with a different remote origin), and even then I noticed git was much more snappy.
It's nowhere near an actual analysis, just my experience in my limited use (and probably influenced quite a bit by things that I've heard).
