But the moment you need any kind of advanced functionality, such as say, something unimaginable like rebasing a Mercurial Queue against an upstream change that conflicts, you are suddenly dealing with tools that are no more advanced than diff and patch
This is incorrect. "hg rebase" is more advanced and smarter than diff and patch. Also, people arguing against Mercurial seem unaware of "hg collapse" which allows rewriting history in a way similar to git.
(However I would probably not use hg rebase on Mercurial queues, which are meant to be managed by mq extension commands.)
I think most of the git vs. mercurial debates are non-productive because proponents of one tool don't know the other tool well enough to argue against it.
This is incorrect...However I would probably not use hg rebase on Mercurial queues, which are meant to be managed by mq extension commands.
You completely contradicted your own claim already.
This is exactly what I'm complaining about: Mercurial Queues are diff and patch. And you need Mercurial Queues for decent Mercurial workflows.
I think most of the git vs. mercurial debates are non-productive because proponents of one tool don't know the other tool well enough to argue against it.
I use Mercurial extensively and on a daily basis, so I think I'm qualified to talk about it. People who claim the complaint is invalid should do Mercurial users a favor and point out a workflow that avoids the issue. I'm still waiting (and manually merging all my patch queues whenever I get a conflict in a topmost patch).
> I think most of the git vs. mercurial debates are non-productive because proponents of one tool don't know the other tool well enough to argue against it.
You hit the nail on the head there. I wouldn't claim at all to know git well, despite having used it in numerous projects. On the other hand I felt like I "knew" Mercurial from the moment I picked it up. I've never written code to work around a problem (as the article suggests), and typically on the few occasions I've had problems I've remedied them by using Mercurial commands I already knew without even needing to look up documentation.
Opinions are clearly divided between two tools that perform the same task in very different ways. You can't please all of the people all of the time, long may both continue. More productive for everyone in my opinion would be ensuring bridge projects like hg-git become first-class citizens of the DVCS world.
This is incorrect. "hg rebase" is more advanced and smarter than diff and patch. Also, people arguing against Mercurial seem unaware of "hg collapse" which allows rewriting history in a way similar to git.
(However I would probably not use hg rebase on Mercurial queues, which are meant to be managed by mq extension commands.)
I think most of the git vs. mercurial debates are non-productive because proponents of one tool don't know the other tool well enough to argue against it.