@Ulai: Hmm, why should one use mercurial or bazaar instead of svn? Why are all the cool kids moving to that??
In general, the merging in distributed systems is much better than that in traditional centralised system, simply due to the nature of how distributed development is meant to work. The problem is that centralised development has a lot of benefits for certain types of work (a single place that can be backed up for example).
Why should you use them over svn? Well I don't use Mercurial, but with Bazaar the biggest advantage is the flexibility of it's workflow. Want to use a fully distributed system? Fine. Fully centralised? Fine as well. Anywhere in between? Fine again. Essentially you can use it just like svn but with the benefits that a distributed system can bring (such as the better merging). You can also quickly switch between a checkout (central style) to a regular branch (distributed style) when you need to using simple commands (bzr unbind, bzr bind). This is useful in situations where you want version control but may not have access to the server.
Here's a quick run through of checking out a project, adding a few files, committing and then updating using the central style of Bazaar (just so you can compare to svn):
bzr checkout sftp://mycentralserver
<Add some files to the project>
bzr add
bzr commit -m "Added some new files"
bzr update
The other benefit is that you don't have .svn folders everywhere.
by Martin Pilkington — Jun 01
In general, the merging in distributed systems is much better than that in traditional centralised system, simply due to the nature of how distributed development is meant to work. The problem is that centralised development has a lot of benefits for certain types of work (a single place that can be backed up for example).
Why should you use them over svn? Well I don't use Mercurial, but with Bazaar the biggest advantage is the flexibility of it's workflow. Want to use a fully distributed system? Fine. Fully centralised? Fine as well. Anywhere in between? Fine again. Essentially you can use it just like svn but with the benefits that a distributed system can bring (such as the better merging). You can also quickly switch between a checkout (central style) to a regular branch (distributed style) when you need to using simple commands (bzr unbind, bzr bind). This is useful in situations where you want version control but may not have access to the server.
Here's a quick run through of checking out a project, adding a few files, committing and then updating using the central style of Bazaar (just so you can compare to svn):
bzr checkout sftp://mycentralserver
<Add some files to the project>
bzr add
bzr commit -m "Added some new files"
bzr update
The other benefit is that you don't have .svn folders everywhere.