Popularity of Git/Mercurial/Bazaar vs. which to recommend
- by Will Robertson
Going by the number of questions on this site for these three distributed version control systems, it seems like Git either
is more popular, or
is more difficult (hence requiring more questions), or
has more features (hence requiring more questions).
Or most probably a combination of the three. (Let's say that popularity on this site equates to popularity at large.) Here are the numbers at time of writing:
[subversion] or [svn]: 2353
[git]: 726
[mercurial] or [hg]: 169
[bazaar] or [bzr]: 50
The recent historical popularity of Subversion is clearly reflected by the number of questions, indicating at least a small tipping of the scales towards Git over the Mercurial or Bazaar.
It's not entirely satisfactory having three competing yet largely equivalent open source products to choose from. Personally I use Git and I'm fine with the other two. But when it comes to recommending one system over the others, I'd like to ask: can we start recommending one safely yet?