Anything that doesn't work through port 80, and with a client that knows about proxies that need usernames and passwords, is a no go for me while I'm in my Uni office.

When I was investigating Git, the patch via email system would require some work to integrate cleanly with clients such as Mail.app or Outlook.

I found this comparison of git vs mercurial here:
Git vs. Mercurial: Please Relax « Important Shock<http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/git-vs-mercurial/>
It's a bit dated, and I can't comment on its comments on Mercurial, but its comments on Git tie with what I've seen of it.

Had a subversion vs. git discussion with a fellow developer & software project manager the other day and he prefers git for large complex bits of software, some of the discussion was in line with Sean's comments below.

Regards,
Dr Matthew Berryman
Defence and Systems Institute
Bldg. W (MLK-05)
University of South Australia
Mawson Lakes  SA  5095
t +61 8 8302 5882
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CRICOS Provider Number: 00121B

On 23/08/2010, at 6:59 AM, Sean Luke wrote:

On Aug 22, 2010, at 2:15 PM, Miles Parker wrote:

Agreed. I really think you should make the break to a Distributed
VCS like Git or Mercurial in the process. A lot of Eclipse projects
are moving from CVS/SVN to Git. It should make a big difference in
terms of people being able to contribute to and morph code and then
having the forks be able to merge back together down the road. It
will be an interesting shift in software ecologies with I think
unexpected ramifications. For example, I'm thinking that while now
forking is seen as damage that paradoxically it might provide more
integration between projects as various projects are able to make
the kinds of local modifications to to other systems that allow them
to fit into their own projects. Such modifications then could be re-
integrated once various stable configurations arose from local
needs. It feels potentially like a much more dynamic creative
process is possible with less of the kind of open source stove-
piping we're all used to. though I must say that right now I can't
even figure out how to get Git to work with two developers merging
code.

Well, the honest truth is: I don't know Git or Mercurial very well at
all, and like all good developers, I fear what I don't know well. :-)
I am comfortable with SVN.  (BTW, only Mercurial and SVN are available
on Google Code -- Git doesn't support HTTP).

So it's gotta take a pretty compelling reason to do Mercurial with
MASON and ECJ.  But the advantages of a distributed VCS tend to be for
large projects with many developers and forks.  MASON and ECJ just
don't have that community structure.  So I remain leaning to SVN but
still open to further debate and convincing.

[of course we can always convert down the line]

Sean