Link to official Mercurial docs instead of our lesson

[maneesha]

How could the content be improved?

The git lesson intro refers to Mercurial as an alternative for version management and links to a very old SWC lesson (has not been updated in 6+ years). Consider linking to the actual Mercurial site instead (which is also old but...).

Which part of the content does your suggestion apply to?

https://swcarpentry.github.io/git-novice/01-basics.html#the-long-history-of-version-control-systems

[maneesha]

Also in that paragraph, Mercurial is called a more modern system - not sure if that applies.

[martinosorb]

Thanks maneesha. I'm leaning towards not fixing this: while few people will want to use Mercurial, I don't see why we should forget that old lesson entirely. It's there in the remote case someone may benefit from it. Regarding the "more modern system", it does not state that it's more modern than git, but that it's 'distributed' like git, and unlike older systems like Subversion.

[maneesha]

If the maintainers don't want to forget an old lesson entirely, we could consider linking both the 7+ year old lesson and the official Mercurial site (which as noted above is also out of date -- it uses Python 2.7??). Please close this issue if you think the change should not be made.