Mercurial revsets and phases are two killer features of mercurial that blows any counterpart git has out of the water.

Phases are a property of revisions that essentially let you know their state. By default, there are three phases: public, draft, and secret. You can't rebase a public revision, nor can you have a public revision with a secret parent. So you get out of this concept things like safe rebasing, or barriers that let you keep internal and external repos separate.

But revsets really shine. This is basically a full-on query language for revisions. So you can define a query alias "wip" that specifies all of the, well, interesting revisions: every revision that is not in the public phase (i.e., not in the upstream repo), the tip of the trunk, the current revision, and sufficient ancestor information of these revisions that you can see where you based all of these WIP branches on. In a single query: "(parents(not public()) or not public() or . or head())".

Sure, composing revsets is definitely a somewhat painful process... but it's possible to describe more or less arbitrary sets with a Mercurial revset, and I've never been able to find a similar workable setup in git.

You can also do `sl/hg log -Gr a21ccf+release_1.9`. The graph tells you the relation of selected commits. Last time I checked, git does not have the same --graph rendering yet - it only considers direct parents not ancestors.

Is it really that confusing for Git? I had basically that entire manpage memorized early on (even before the manpage existed....)