Re: Thoughts on Git, Mercurial, Github, and Bitbucket.

[Tux]

Our choice to use git in our company project was only based on availability (or easy to make it available) on the platform it had to run on: HP-UX.

When you are on Linux, just use your fav package manager to install all, compare and choose what fits best (yes, I've done so with most Version Control Systems on my Linux box to at least see what they offer). On HP-UX however, I didn't even consider Mercurial, because it is Python based, and I did not get Python installed on that box (I also must admit I didn't try very hard as we're more a perl company and don't need python for anything else). I gave up on svn after a week of trying: it has way to many dependencies that do not build on 64bit HP-UX and the response from their developers was alarmingly "I don't care" like. Git otoh built almost out of the box. I had it up and running in less than 5 hours. Took yet another day to get the GUI's working, but one doesn't really need it for a working VSC.

Our projects were in SCCS which started to fail when files started to contain UTF-8, so there was a lot of pressure to move from SCCS to anything more modern that worked. Our first choice was to compare svn and git, but as svn didn't compile, we chose git and up to now never regret that.

GUI-wise, I have never seen a more inituïtive interface than p4v, the GUI for perforce and I still think that git-gui and gitk differ too much in presentation style and user experience. It should have been one single front-end. As JavaFan said: it's software. Whatever you choose/use will suck somewhere. I personally hate svn because it is so extremely counter-intuitive and centralized (and slow compared to git), but if I have to, I'll use it (though I prefer to make git-svn clones if I can).

[derby]

Our projects were in SCCS which started to fail when files started to contain UTF-8

WOW! Really ... in 20XX you were still on SCCS ... now that's some technical debt. Twenty years ago, I transitioned a project from SCCS to RCS since the build process was bogged down by SCCS 'apply patches to get current file' architecture (maybe it changed ... but I doubt it).