What makes merging in DVCS easy?
- by afriza
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?
