The problems occur when you make substantial changes in a branch and then you go to merge it back. SVN has several issues how it merges things. Probably the b

The problems occur when you make substantial changes in a branch and then you go to merge it back. SVN has several issues how it merges things. Probably the biggest issue is that SVN can't properly merge file renames. Second it does 2-way merges as opposed to Git's recursive 3-way merges (I assume Hg does something similar). Recursive 3-way merges are much much better at resolving conflicts. Finally, SVN has some issues with merging a branch multiple times. This is because SVN doesn't have a natural way to record merges in history. I've heard that this last issue has improved in newer versions but it doesn't sound like it has completely gone away.