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by ltbarcly3 493 days ago
Being able to merge code is important, distributed repositories is nice but nobody switched to get that.

Apart from making merging much much less painful, the huge selling point was that SVN was extremely slow. Changing branches required chatting with the server in most cases, and could take a minute or two. You couldn't just switch back and forth between branches.

1 comments

"Changing branches required chatting with the server in most cases, and could take a minute or two."

Which is directly solved by being a DVCS, yes. Your second paragraph contradicts your first.

Darcs and Pijul can change branches very rapidly despite being diff-based, because they too are DVCS (and the inverse patches basically already got computed upon commit, so it's easy on the CPU).

But Darcs replaces slow branch changes with something that no other VCS has (that I'm aware of), slow commits! Making a commit can take 5 minutes!