My recent post about using Git/Mercurial on my home directory really pushed me to figure out which DVCS I wanted to move to long term. I wanted to share with you the reasons why I switched, not to try to convince you to switch to Mercurial, but to share with you things you may not have known about it. These observations were primarily over the last week, but I had interacted with both git and mercurial prior to taking the time to learn more about them. I will also mention that there are going to be things about Mercurial and Git that I cannot comment on. I do not deal with distributed version control as much as I do centralized so I am unable to comment on features that are more DVCS specific.
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UPDATE: I just initialized a mercurial repository in my home dir as well to have a side by side comparison of the two. If you are interested in using mercurial please look at the bottom for a few notes on setting it up.

In Ubuntu 9.04 a new application was introduced called etckeeper. This application uses various version control systems to store versions of files within etc. Some machines that I work on I keep my home directory very clean, and I go out of my way to keep things organized and stored in version control. I have dropped the ball on being so organized when it comes to my home desktop, but tonight, that changed. This is how to use version control with your home directory. I am not going to cover indepth topics about using Git or any other version control, this guide simply explains how to maintain a local repository.

The first step is to install your preferred version control system. In this case I am going to use git, since a lot of people are familiar with it.

sudo apt-get install git
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