[Groxx]

Until semi-recently, Git[1] wouldn't let you do a shallow checkout and still do useful things. For a large project, for most purposes, downloading all of history is pointless and immensely wasteful. SVN handles that just fine, and people who want git locally can use git-svn.

(edit: LLVM is surprisingly small, actually - a git clone comes in at just under 900MB. for more painful examples tho, see repos that commit(ted) binaries, or the scale of Android's repos)

[1]: AFAIK Mercurial still has no built-in support, though extensions exist. Which is probably the right choice for Mercurial.

[tux3]

>LLVM is surprisingly small, actually - a git clone comes in at just under 900MB

That's a little bit on the small side, but it's still very manageable. For comparison Linux's .git folder comes in at 1.3GB on my computer, and LibreOffice's repo which has git history going back to the year 2000 weights some 3.6 GB. I can happily say that I haven't had any performance or space problem dealing with either full repos, even on my fairly weak laptop.