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Subversion considers its future
Subversion considers its future
Posted May 9, 2008 13:38 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501)In reply to: Subversion considers its future by mikov
Parent article: Subversion considers its future
I was a heavy and enthusiastic SVN user and it took me about a couple of hours (well, perhaps a day) to learn to use Git as a 100% SVN replacement. Everything beyond that was just a bonus.
Mikov, you must be much cleverer than me and my fellow (corporate) developers. I've now been to 3 talks on using git, as it is obviously cool, but I still don't 'get' it. SVN I do get, at least enough to use it for our work. I don't think I'm particularly stupid so I suspect this situation is common. My compatriot Nick went to the same James Bottomley talk at Linuxconf 2007 and he came out equally nonplussed.
We find SVN does a great job and will be used for the forseeable future (I spend my time trying to stop people piling _everything_, no matter how innapropriate, in, and re-arranging stuff which has 27 slightly-different versions in different dirs because people have failed to grasp what it is that a VCS does). I'm not sure we are ready for anything cleverer.
We might use a DVCS if we could see any major advantage in doing so, and I know I'd like to understand git because I suspect it makes pushing kernel patches upstream much easier, but like I said, so far I don't get it well enough to understand exactly what it might gain us, nor to actually use it for anything. And changing any infrastructure involves significant pain so there has to be sufficient incentive...
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Subversion considers its future
Posted May 11, 2008 22:18 UTC (Sun) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
Mikov, you must be much cleverer than me and my fellow (corporate) developers. I've now been to 3 talks on using git, as it is obviously cool, but I still don't 'get' it. SVN I do get, at least enough to use it for our work. I don't think I'm particularly stupid so I suspect this situation is common. My compatriot Nick went to the same James Bottomley talk at Linuxconf 2007 and he came out equally nonplussed.
I don't think I am especially clever (or at least I won't admit it in public :-) Also, don't forget that I too am a corporate developer - I work for a corporation, albeit a small one. I think it helped me a lot that I researched a couple of alternative DVCS before trying Git, so I was already familiar with the subject area. It does take some mental re-adjustment.
It really is simple to use Git as a SVN replacement, with just a dozen commands, without getting too deep. Once you get comfortable with that, you will gradually discover the other possibilities - that's what I did.
Perhaps fortunately we had needs that SVN didn't fill while Git did (branch and patch management, efficient access from multiple locations, hierarchical commit structure, etc - btw, we did look into SVK). Also it helps that we are much more flexible, being a small shop.
I would not advocate to anybody to just blindly replace SVN with Git, if SVN is already working great for them and they don't have an obvious need to fill. SVN is a great tool. It also has advantages when keeping multiple projects in the same repository. In fact I love SVN, it is just I love Git even more :-)
About "getting" Git, even if you don't start using it seriously, my advice is not to waste time with talks, etc. I recommend reading the documentation that comes with it and perhaps Linus'es original low level description for the design motivation.