It's not that a DVCS doesn't allow you to have that kind of workflow, if you look at the kernel you'll notice that it almost does have that workflow with many many maintainer trees being hosted on git.kernel.org. But I do agree that it's easier to enforce with svn, since it simply doesn't allow locally committing.
Posted Jan 15, 2009 13:50 UTC (Thu) by kpfleming (subscriber, #23250)
[Link]
Actually. plenty of developers on Subversion-hosted projects use svk locally to do their work, and then 'push' the results upstream. This is harder to setup and use than if the project used git. In addition, developers are now starting to use git-svn to do the same thing, so the days of the 'master Subversion repo' being the place where everything lives because the tool doesn't allow for any other mode of operation are already gone.
In the future, if the project needs a central 'blessed' repository and wants all work to be done in the open, those needs will have to be met through policy statements and enforcement, because the VCS isn't going to do it.