SVN [LWN.net]

SVN

Posted Feb 5, 2008 4:50 UTC (Tue) by yarikoptic (subscriber, #36795)
In reply to: SVN by stevenj
Parent article: Linux Gazette #147

Although I would favor to see git (package git-core in debian gnu/linux) userbase growing faster than subversion's, but it seems not to be the case at least in Debian land according to Popcon on subversion and git-core

It is partially explained by the fact that in most of use-cases of avg joe "user" git might be overwhelming and SVN would look like a right tool. On the other hand subversion has been out there for a while and there are nice embeddings for it in many IDEs and environments, whenever GIT still lacks that, thus is not very attractive to avg joe user who likes bells-and-whistles (although more I use gitk more I like it ;-)).

just today I was at a job interview at some relatively large company and few interviewers revealed the 'knowledge' about existence of subversion but noone knew what is git, which says about generic trend in faster adoption of subversion than git in industry... Although the 'news' that git is written originally by the author of linux kernel makes good impression and makes people to have a look what beast git is.

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git

Posted Feb 5, 2008 9:01 UTC (Tue) by tv (subscriber, #32991) [Link]

Well, git (1.4.x) in stable/etch being unable to properly work with repositories created (or
even worked on? I don't know) would seem like quite a barrier to adoption. Yes, there is an
updated version in backports, but it is a problem for the casual user.

SVN

Posted Feb 5, 2008 9:42 UTC (Tue) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

+1

Although I use git almost exclusively (and when I have to, I use git-cvsimport or git-svn to
work with legacy repositories; does anybody know about good git-bzr2?), I still see tremendous
lack of support outside of the hardcore Linux geeks -- there is no good (and stable/mature)
support for git in Eclipse/Anjuta/(not sure about KDevelop), I don't know about any support in
Nautilus, or something on the level of cerevisa.

SVN

Posted Feb 5, 2008 19:09 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

There actually is a git-on-Eclipse plugin.  It's basically git functionality 100%
re-implemented in Java.  Don't bother with it, though: it has a few issues and is now quite
out of date.

The much better way to handle this, of course, would be to slice a libgit out of git's
codebase.  Eclipse, Anjuta, etc would link against libgit and a single codebase would handle
everything.  No muss, no fuss.

Unfortunately, git was quite consciously written to just abandon memory when when it's done.
Just terminating and letting the OS clean everything up is *much* faster than meticulously
paging in and freeing every little data structure.

Problem is, run this code in a persistent app and what happens?  Memory leak city.  Scary in
scale.

So, the Git team are working on cleaning up the leaks and arranging a libgit.  It's a huge
undertaking though and, last I heard though (6 months ago?) it's still a long way off.  Sigh.

bzr's Eclipse bindings are pretty darned great BTW.  They're definitely worth a look if you
want to do distributed-on-Eclipse.

SVN

Posted Feb 6, 2008 9:58 UTC (Wed) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

Yeah, libgit would be awesome. I was using RCS for a lot of time, and so I have plenty of RCS
repositories -- it would be actually better to convert these directory to .git repositories
instead of getting through CVS. There is git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/parsecvs for
that, but it requires libgit. Oh well.

SVN

Posted Feb 6, 2008 23:52 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I see no reason why a programmatic interface to git's tools that forks 
them off and talks to them via pipes couldn't be written. It wouldn't even 
be hard. (I'm not sure it's worth it, though: it's not as if it's 
difficult for people who need to talk to git via pipes to do so now.)