What makes some version control systems better at merging?

Question

I\'ve heard that many of the distributed VCSs (git, mercurial, etc) are better at merging than traditional ones like Subversion. What does this mean? What sort of things do

Answer 1

The merge tracking in 1.5 is better than no merge tracking, but it is still very much a manual process. I do like the way that it records which rev's are and aren't merged, but its no where near perfect.

Merge has a nice dialog in 1.5. You can pick which revisions you wish to merge individually, or the whole branch. You then trigger the merge which occurs locally (and takes FOREVER) when then gives you a bunch of files to read through. You need to check logically each file for the correct behaviour (preferably running through unit tests on the files) and if you have conflicts you have to resolve them. Once your happy you make a commit of your change and at that point the branch is considered merged.

If you do it piecemeal, SVN will remember what you have previously said that you have merged, allowing you to merge. I found the process and the result of some of the merges to be strange to say the least however...