Branching off of your argument, there's a significant amount of activation energy to start a new svn repo, compared to mercurial or git. I find that when all I

Branching off of your argument, there's a significant amount of activation energy to start a new svn repo, compared to mercurial or git. I find that when all I need to do upfront is type "hg init", I end up using VC for far more. For example, all the dotfiles in my home directory, my window manager setup (a somewhat-patched dwm), and my bin dir are in an hg repo. It makes "moving in" to a new computer (and syncing with my laptop) much easier. You can use mercurial as if it were svn, just an svn that isn't a pain in the ass to set up, and that makes free backups for you automatically. Anything past that is just a bonus.