[silentbicycle]

You're right. I found keeping a different directory for a different branch a bit annoying, but it's not a big deal. (Besides, if you're keeping really, really large binaries under VC, you're probably using the wrong tool.)

[ubernostrum]

Well, again -- you don't have to do the whole separate-clones thing. Mercurial's bookmarks are pretty much git-style branches under a different name, for example. And even though they're provided by an extension they're really not anything fancy: they're just a thin layer of UI on top of normal hg operations (in hg terms, bookmarks just boil down to a way to name -- and thus jump to, merge from, etc. -- heads in the repository).