To be fair the "shortcomings" that spurred it on mainly were the Samba guys (or just one) reverse-engineering Bitkeeper causing the kernel free license getting pulled, which caused Linus to say "I can build my own with blackjack and pre-commit hooks" and then he did, addressing it toward his exact use case.

It gained tons of popularity mainly because of Linus being behind it; similar projects already existed when it was released.

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xtracto 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Mercurial was there, was better and more complete.

Too sad it didnt win the VCS wars.

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seanhunter 11 hours ago | parent [-]

When I tried both at that time hg was just really slow so I just adopted git for all my personal projects because it was fast and a lot better than cvs. I imagine others were the same.

	▲	bombcar 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I went with bzr mainly because it had an easy way to plugin "revision" into my documents in a way I could understand and monotonously increment. hg was slow though I don't know how bzr compared as I was using it pretty light-weight.