newbie overview

[Neal Becker]

I am just looking at mercurial.  So far it looks interesting, but I don't
know much about it.  Is there somewhere I can learn about how mercurial
compares with other scm approaches?

There is no shortage of new efforts to develop the ultimate scm tool.  I
love Python, so I'm particularly interested in python based tools.  Another
is bazaar-ng.

Distributed development seems like a good thing for many environments.  At
least, it seem the democratic philosophy is appealing.

I think we are in a period where many ideas have been offered.  It will
probably take some time and experience to see which ideas work well in
practice before some concensus develops.  I'd like to learn where mercurial
fits.