Version Control Software

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.3185.1371126784.3114.python-list at python.org>,
 Tim Chase <python.list at tim.thechases.com> wrote:

> On 2013-06-13 10:20, Serhiy Storchaka wrote:
> > 13.06.13 05:41, Tim Chase написав(ла):
> > > -hg: last I checked, can't do octopus merges (merges with more
> > > than two parents)
> > >
> > > +git: can do octopus merges
> > 
> > Actually it is possible in Mercurial.
> 
> Okay, then that moots this pro/con pair.  I seem to recall that at
> one point in history, Mercurial required you to do pairwise merges
> rather than letting you merge multiple branches in one pass.
> 
> -tkc

So, I guess the next questions is, why would you *want* to merge 
multiple branches in one pass?  What's the use case?  I've been using 
VCSs for a long time (I've used RCS, CVS, ClearCase, SVN (briefly), 
Perforce, Git, and hg).  I can't ever remember a time when I've wanted 
to do such a thing.  Maybe it's the kind of thing that makes sense on a 
huge distributed project with hundreds of people committing patches 
willy-nilly?

How would hg even represent such a multi-way merge?  Doesn't every 
revision have exactly one or two parents?