title: Merging: Hg/Git vs. SVN
body: <p>I often read that Hg (and Git and...) are better at merging than SVN but I have never seen practical examples of where Hg/Git can merge something where SVN fails (or where SVN needs manual intervention). Could you post a few step-by-step lists of branch/modify/commit/...-operations that show where SVN would fail while Hg/Git happily moves on? Practical, not highly exceptional cases please...</p>
  
  <p>Some background: we have a few dozen developers working on projects using SVN, with each project (or group of similar projects) in its own repository. We know how to apply release- and feature-branches so we don't run into problems very often (i.e., we've been there, but we've learned to overcome <a href="http://hginit.com/00.html" rel="noreferrer">Joel's problems</a> of "one programmer causing trauma to the whole team" or "needing six developers for two weeks to reintegrate a branch"). We have release-branches that are very stable and only used to apply bugfixes. We have trunks that should be stable enough to be able to create a release within one week. And we have feature-branches that single developers or groups of developers can work on. Yes, they are deleted after reintegration so they don't clutter up the repository. ;)</p>
  
  <p>So I'm still trying to find the advantages of Hg/Git over SVN. I'd love to get some hands-on experience, but there aren't any bigger projects we could move to Hg/Git yet, so I'm stuck with playing with small artificial projects that only contain a few made up files. And I'm looking for a few cases where you can feel the impressive power of Hg/Git, since so far I have often read about them but failed to find them myself.</p>