The issue is that the C in CI is a convenient fiction. Someone on your team is always going to be changing the code, which means that they will have it, at some

The issue is that the C in CI is a convenient fiction. Someone on your team is always going to be changing the code, which means that they will have it, at some point, in a state that fails validation. Requiring that they get it to a point where it's fully passing is fine, but in many cases that just means a longer time before checkins. DVCSes, on the other hand, bring to the surface and keep in the record that the code is always branched to some degree. It's not that it's incompatible, it's that it's giving more granular information than the CI process can work with or needs.