#Svn diff between revisions update

#Svn diff between revisions update

Git and Mercurial lets you commit first, and then update and merge as necessary. This is kind of risky since you haven't stored your changes anywhere safe. In general, Subversion forces you to play around with a dirty working copy when you svn update. You cannot just ignore the changes on the server and keep committing on your own anonymous branch.

This is very difficult with Subversion where you're required to update before you can commit. So he can hg merge and maybe he's better at resolving conflicts than you are. If hg merge gives you a ton of conflicts, then you can ask your coworker to hg pull from you and then he has the exact same state. You can easily delay a merge or even let someone else handle it. This a much simpler model than the one used by Subversion and this cuts away a number of corner cases. The history therefore becomes a directed acyclic graph instead of being linear. Mercurial and Git does not use this model - branches are instead modeled directly in the history. Subversion has some 'voodoo' where you can merge from /trunk into, say, /branches/foo. He also raises some good points about the differences: (Yes, this is surprising! Yes, lots of DVCS guides get this horribly wrong.) All that matters is the final version of the files. You can have used 1000 small commits since the ancestor version, or you can have used 1 commit. It doesn't matter how the two branch versions were created. All three systems merge with the standard three-way merge algorithm and the inputs to that algorithm are The size of your commits makes no difference when it comes to merging. They are all logically atomic snapshots of a set of files. Calling them versions, revisions, or changesets makes no difference. Subversion, Mercurial, and Git all track repository-wide snapshots of the project. With regard to tdammers answer, then there is a number of misunderstandings there: The situation is a simple refactoring done on a branch where you rename some files. Please see my Stack Overflow answer for a very concrete situation where Mercurial (and Git) merges without problems and where Subversion presents you with a bogus conflict.