"Every clone of a Mercurial repository can act as a consistent, fully functional repository itself.This is a very useful property of a DVCS; one that you can take advantage of to make development a lot easier, especially for teams that are dispersed in multiple places of the globe..." — Mercu

There are many blog posts and articles all over the Internet providing comparissons between Git and Mercurial. Most of them only briefly describe the main differences and then try to decide which one is better. However, I didn’t find many articles explaining the differences in detail.

According to its developers, "Mercurial is a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects." Dozens of projects already use the software. Here's how you can get started with some basic version control tasks using Mercurial.