I have been wondering about version control systems (VCS) recently and I wanted to build a list with clear advantages of Mercurial over Subversion. First of all, Mercurial is a distributed VCS, Subversion is not. This brings advantages like:

1) You have a full copy of the repository on your computer, so you don’t have to rely on server backups in case a server goes down.

2) If you don’t have internet connection, you can still work and commit the changes to your local repository. When the connection is back online, you can push your changes to the server.

3) Mercurial organizes revisions as changesets which allow you to very easily branch/merge the code base. Merging a branch in SVN is harder.