> The git source tree is more than four hundred percent bigger than the are you comparing the size of a project in python with the size of a project written in C?. The logical relation should be 2 times the size of hg, and then you could say that they have a similar size.
> mercurial source tree. git ships more than 160 *man pages*. It is the It is due to git keeps the api in small programs than you could use in your scripts. These small programs are 100% Unix philosophy (do only one thing and do it fine, write an output that can be used as input for other, ...). Work with these low-level progams (plumbling in git vocabulary) is hard, and it is the reason git have a 'user friendly' (porcelain in git vocabulary) programs, which are pretty similar to these you can find in mercurial. If you don't need an advanced use of git then you will read only the pages of porcelain programs, whose number is similar to the programs in mercurial. Maybe you like more have a library and have to link all the others programs with it, and duplicate the work in all the binaries where the library is linked, instead of using small programs.