I often read that hg (and git and...) are better at merging than svn but I have never seen practical examples of where hg/git can merge something where svn fails (or where svn needs manual intervention). Could you post a few step-by-step lists of branch/modify/commit/...-operations that show where svn would fail while hg/git happily moves on? Practical, not highly exceptional cases please...

Some background: we have a few dozen developers working on projects using svn, with each project (or group of similar projects) in its own repo. We know how to apply release- and feature-branches so we don't run into problems very often (i.e. we've been there, but we've learned to overcome joel's problems of "one programmer causing trauma to the whole team" or "needing six developers for two weeks to reintegrate a branch"). We have release-branches that are very stable and only used to apply bugfixes. We have trunks that should be stable enough to be able to create a release within one week. And we have feature-branches that single developers or groups of developers can work on. Yes, they are deleted after reintegration so they don't clutter up the repository. ;)

So I'm still trying to find the advantages of hg/git over svn. I'd love to get some hands-on experience, but there aren't any bigger projects we could move to hg/git yet, so I'm stuck with playing with small artifical projects that only contain a few made up files. And I'm looking for a few cases where you can feel the impressive power of hg/git, since so far I have often read about them but failed to find them myself.