> If somebody else had written it and he'd used it, the outcome would have been the same.
IIRC, the mercurial project had already started when Linus started working on Git. (In fact, very early versions of Xen used BitKeeper, following suit with Linux; when the license changed, Xen moved over to mercurial because git wasn't ready yet, and stuck with it for a number of years.)
The main reason Linus wasn't happy with mercurial was the performance -- Linux just has far far more commits and files to deal with than nearly any other project on the planet, and even at the time, operations in mercurial took just a bit too long for Linus.
> Linux just has far far more commits and files to deal with
Not really. I work with Mercurial every day, in a FAANG company's monorepo which is many many times the size of the Linux kernel. It's not always pleasant, but it's not clear git would be any better. Mercurial's performance issues are solvable, have been solved to a large degree, but IIRC when git started that was not the case. It's a shame really. The fragmentation is annoying sometimes, even if it's the result of historical accident rather than any bad decisions made at any particular moment in time.
IIRC, the mercurial project had already started when Linus started working on Git. (In fact, very early versions of Xen used BitKeeper, following suit with Linux; when the license changed, Xen moved over to mercurial because git wasn't ready yet, and stuck with it for a number of years.)
The main reason Linus wasn't happy with mercurial was the performance -- Linux just has far far more commits and files to deal with than nearly any other project on the planet, and even at the time, operations in mercurial took just a bit too long for Linus.