How do different version control systems handle binary files?

Question

I have heard some claims that SVN handles binary files better than Git/Mercurial. Is this true and if so then why? As far as I can imagine, no version control system (VCS) c

Answer 1

In Subversion you can lock binary files to make sure that nobody else can edit them. This mostly assures you that nobody else will modify that binary file while you have it locked. Distributed VCSs don't (and can't) have locks--there's no central repository for them to be registered at.