[projectileboy]

Thank you very much for the breakdown. I still don't see the benefit, however. Saying that you don't have an official repository is just semantics, because someone will in fact be responsible for the final merge, and that's going to be the official repository, whether you call it that or not. Furthermore, the code all has to get merged in the end. How does it simplify thing to merge from C --> B --> A --> Official, rather than just have everyone merging against an official repository?

Again, I'm not trolling - I ask these questions because I'm working somewhere right now where they use Clearcase, which admittedly is a horrible, horrible, horrible tool, but which is being used in my current environment very much like a DVCS. Everyone feels "productive" because they can merge their branch into other folks' branches on an as needed basis. But the end result is freakin' chaos from the point of view of product management, because it takes - literally - weeks to get a completely merged codebase containing the entire product. How does a tool like Git help matters?