What's so difficult about SVN merges? [closed]
- by Mason Wheeler
Possible Duplicate:
I’m a Subversion geek, why should I consider or not consider Mercurial or Git or any other DVCS?
Every once in a while, you hear someone saying that distributed version control (Git, HG) is inherently better than centralized version control (like SVN) because merging is difficult and painful in SVN. The thing is, I've never had any trouble with merging in SVN, and since you only ever hear that claim being made by DVCS advocates, and not by actual SVN users, it tends to remind me of those obnoxious commercials on TV where they try to sell you something you don't need by having bumbling actors pretend that the thing you already have and works just fine is incredibly difficult to use.
And the use case that's invariably brought up is re-merging a branch, which again reminds me of those strawman product advertisements; if you know what you're doing, you shouldn't (and shouldn't ever have to) re-merge a branch in the first place. (Of course it's difficult to do when you're doing something fundamentally wrong and silly!)
So, discounting the ridiculous strawman use case, what is there in SVN merging that is inherently more difficult than merging in a DVCS system?
