codesmell.org

a very nice introduction into mercurial can be found here. It nicely goes from bashing subversion

The story is this: at some point, they tried to branch their code, usually so that the shipping version which they gave their customers can be branched off separately from the version that the developers are playing with. And every team has told me that when they tried this, it worked fine, until they had to merge, and then it was a nightmare. What should have been a five minute process ended up with six programmers around a single computer working for two weeks trying to manually reapply every single bug fix from the stable build back into the development build.

And almost every Subversion team told me that they vowed “never again,” and they swore off branches. And now what they do is this: each new feature is in a big #ifdef block. So they can work in one single trunk, while customers never see the new code until it’s debugged, and frankly, that’s ridiculous.

to explaining the simple commands, and further to conceptual perspectives like repository distribution.

a nice read.