What makes merging in DVCS easy?

Question

I read at Joel on Software:

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

The inte

Answer 1

Whoa, attack of the 5-paragraph essays!

In short, nothing makes it easy. It is hard, and my experience indicates that errors do occur. But:

• DVCS forces you to deal with merging, which means taking a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the tools that exist to help you out. That alone helps.

• DVCS encourages you to merge frequently, which helps too.

The snippet of hginit that you quoted, claiming that Subversion is unable to do three-way merges and that Mercurial merges by looking at all the changesets in both branches, is simply wrong on both counts.