[quote=“nathan”]I haven’t used GIT or Mercurial. Reading reviews seems to indicate that both are superior products (newer generation) compared to SVN, but neither provides the leap that SVN was over CVS.
importantshock.wordpress.com/200 … mercurial/
rockstarprogrammer.org/post/ … l-and-git/
What do you like about them?[/quote]
Unlike SVN branching and merging is awesome and fast. You’ll find yourself opening a branch and committing changes for everything. If you have a new feature, idea, bug fix, etc. you can easily create a new branch quickly, do a few commits on that branch and then either merge it into the main branch or throw it away. You don’t have to mess up the main branch just to save your experimental ideas.
You have a local copy of the repo so all your changes can be commited right away. You only have to merge with yourself until your ready to commit entire features to the main repository.
Because everyone essentially has their own little version control ecosystem, data is always backed up. With SVN you have to worry about when the last time you back up the repo, but any Git or Mercurial user just needs to push their copy of the repo back out to get everyone back to business.
Its difficult to cover all the advantages, but those are the ones I’ve seen for myself. Personally I like Git over Mercurial due to the way Mercurial handles branching, but to each their own. From the perspective of Ignition, the power of a DVCS isn’t really a huge improvement over just getting version control in the first place. Where DVCS really shines is collaborative projects. Check out github.com/ for an example of DVCS enabling organizations to handle open source much easier than sourceforge ever was.