What makes merging in DVCS easy?

Posted by afriza on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by afriza
Published on 2010-04-10T13:25:11Z Indexed on 2010/04/10 13:43 UTC
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I read at Joel on Software:

With distributed version control, the distributed part is actually not the most interesting part.

The interesting part is that these systems think in terms of changes, not in terms of versions.

and at HgInit:

When we have to merge, Subversion tries to look at both revisions—my modified code, and your modified code—and it tries to guess how to smash them together in one big unholy mess. It usually fails, producing pages and pages of “merge conflicts” that aren’t really conflicts, simply places where Subversion failed to figure out what we did.

By contrast, while we were working separately in Mercurial, Mercurial was busy keeping a series of changesets. And so, when we want to merge our code together, Mercurial actually has a whole lot more information: it knows what each of us changed and can reapply those changes, rather than just looking at the final product and trying to guess how to put it together.

By looking at the SVN's repository folder, I have the impression that Subversion is maintaining each revisions as changeset. And from what I know, Hg is using both changeset and snapshot while Git is purely using snapshot to store the data.

If my assumption is correct, then there must be other ways that make merging in DVCS easy. What are those?

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