While I am a huge Git fan, I completely understand their decision to go with Mercurial. It has better documentation, better cross-platform support, and a similar feature set. Git is improving in all these areas, and I use Git for my personal projects, but Mercurial does have its advantages.

Python's move to Hg might have been an influence as well. Mssr. vRossum does work for GOOG after all.

Well the google code support was started long time before Python started looking for a DVCS. If one had an influence on the other it was probably the other way round.

I wouldn't count on it. Internally Google uses Perforce for version control (and IIRC git for some public-facing things), and it's been noted that Google's Python style rules and procedures are quite different from Guido's (their style guide actually goes against PEP 8 -- easy way to spot open-source contributions from Googlers, though).

In all honesty, I bet the GitHub folks are ecstatic over this decision.

=)

edit: To elaborate, we view the growth of DVCS in general as a good thing. (Also we have a big surprise coming soon for hg users.)

I sure hope that means Hg support with github

I was going to start rawring but this made me laugh. Still odd they chose to support Mercurial first. Maybe it's used internally more that git is?

They document their tradeoff analysis here: http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis

Google mainly uses Perforce internally. They do use git for their external Android repository (with automatic imports from their internal Perforce branches).