git - Distributed Version Control "killer applications"

Question

Considering switching to Mercurial or Git? We are too. I'm currently studying the benefits of DVCS which turn out to be vast, lust and must.

I would love to hear from the community typical usage patterns.

Let's create a "Top N" productivity feature list for DVCS (based on Mercurial, Git or alike).

Please describe work flows that prove to be productive for you / your team, procedures that DVCS helped you achieve/improve as well as blunt "good stuff" that DVCS gives you (don't assume stuff are clear to the novice user).

I think that such a list could help folks approaching the team with a DVCS suggestion.

This question is community wiki, obviously.

Answer 1

The one true actual killer feature is...

merging

DVCS (Git, Mercurial or other) are made for merging (precisely because, being distributed, merging is the key feature allowing those tools to quickly integrate code coming from various remote repositories).
SVN isn't up to the task (even today).
See:

• What makes merging in DVCS easy
• Why is branching and merging easier in Mercurial than in Subversion?
• How does Git solve the merging problem?
• What makes some version control systems better at merging?