He claims he did not use Mercurial because (a) it stores the history in binary blobs, (b) it does not have sequential revision numbers, and (c) its CLI syntax is ugly, see [1]. Unfortunately he is wrong about (b) and (c). Mercurial assigns automatic sequential revision numbers (perfect for a single non-distributed repo) and its CLI syntax is so neat that this is the reason I do use it a lot to track changes to single files...
Sounds like ESR should have spent a little more time studying Mercurial.
I cannot understand his need for (a). Does he want the possibility to quickly and easily see, or edit the history? If it's only seeing it all, in one command, then a simple "hg log -e" does it.
Edit: @leoc I based my comment on "Other projects to mold Mercurial and Git [...] will fail criteria #3 and #5, and often #4 as well" with #4 referring to a "modern CLI syntax". But yeah it could be implied that this criticism does not (always) apply to Mercurial.
I'm nit particularly fond of git, I much prefer mercurial - but they are of course pretty much equivalent. Either way I have a hard time seeing which usecases aren't covered by the duo of RCS and mercurial (actually I'm very hard pressed to see why one would ever use RCS over mercurial, but no question RCS is simpler). At least something like fossil have some actually unique features....
Sounds like ESR should have spent a little more time studying Mercurial.
I cannot understand his need for (a). Does he want the possibility to quickly and easily see, or edit the history? If it's only seeing it all, in one command, then a simple "hg log -e" does it.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/FAQ.html#another-vcs
Edit: @leoc I based my comment on "Other projects to mold Mercurial and Git [...] will fail criteria #3 and #5, and often #4 as well" with #4 referring to a "modern CLI syntax". But yeah it could be implied that this criticism does not (always) apply to Mercurial.