[Rd] SVN vs DVCS

[Terry Therneau]

One small technical note:
Simon said
> That (non-linear history) is IMHO the biggest drawback of DVCS because
> that means there is no way to link a particular build to the source 
> status and you cannot use globally valid build numbers.

In mercurial (Hg) a particular snapshot can be labeled with a tag, and
then referred to by that name in the future.  This problem and solution
is discussed in a tutorial on Mecurial (http://hginit.com/, section on
"repository architecture"), precisely for matching the archive state to
a software release.  I can't speak to any other DVCS package.

Terry Therneau