BzrVsMercurial, choosing between the two

[Matt Nordhoff]

David Cournapeau wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>    I am myself a bzr user for some time now, and I am really satisfied
> with it. For various reasons, for a project I am a regular contributor
> to, I had problems with subversion, and so suggested to start a
> discussion about moving to a DVCS. As the underlying projects are
> relatively small (few tens of files, no binary files, etc...), I was
> confident that bzr would be a good contender.
>    Now, most people welcome the change to DVCS, but most (basically
> everybody but me) suggested mercurial, or maybe git. I myself used a bit
> mercurial, but not that much; I certainly know bzr much better. If one
> want to choose between the two, it is hard to make a choice: most people
> say they want mercurial because that's what they use, and I can't say I
> have better reasons to recommend bzr; IOW, mercurial works for them, and
> bzr works for me.

<snip>

>    The project is numpy/scipy, which is an open source project (a cloud
> of projects, more exactly) for scientific computing in python. The
> biggest subversion repository, scipy, has a few thousand files, and the
> subversion history is around 3500 revisions for the trunk.

<snip>

Since there's a link to the discussion on one of Mercurial's mailing
lists, I thought I should put it here too:

<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/18130>

I haven't read much of the thread or thought about this much. I will say
that I think bzr and hg are both good choices. If more of your project's
contributors are experienced with hg, it might be better to go with it.

On your comment in the thread about bzr-svn using a different format,
you can 'bzr upgrade --pack-0.92-subtree' (in the repo and all of the
branches). That's the same as the new pack-0.92 format, plus subtree
support. You can also use the 'rich-root-pack' format, which doesn't
support subtrees, but is enough for bzr-svn.
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