Oh the branching and merging can be big problems for some of us :-) The difference is that hg preserves the local commits as part of the upstream commit-set.

Oh the branching and merging can be big problems for some of us :-) The difference is that hg preserves the local commits as part of the upstream commit-set. That gives it a lot of information when making decisions about merging. SVN only has two versions of the file: what's in the server and yours. There's just less information to merge intelligently.