Subversion considers its future

Subversion considers its future

Posted May 11, 2008 22:18 UTC (Sun) by mikov (subscriber, #33179)
In reply to: Subversion considers its future by wookey
Parent article: Subversion considers its future

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.

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