http://www.tfnico.com/presentations/git-and-subversion

On more thing regarding ‘flavor of the month’. Many importan projects (like the Linux kernel, and Google Android) are on GIT, so that should count for something as for stability and usability :)

What’s the point of making svn add/delete files when you have no real connection to the repository? You don’t save any steps from committing your changes back to the repository. And without real connection to the repository you can’t save your changes back to the repository, period.

The thing that is missing from a centralize source control repository is : you have NO local history that you can back out of, recover from, or compare with. Now, all you SVN-gurus please tell me how do you preserve your work locally without committing back to the repository? Do you always cut a branch when you even work on a small bug fix? How about when you want to experiment something but don’t want to add/commit to the trunk and your other co-worker can’t see what you are working on without you committing it to the repository?

If you have never encountered this type of situations, then the tool is NOT FOR YOU, period, there is no need to bash the idea that this tool might work better for others when where the SVN falls short really matters to the project to those people.

because programming is craftsmanship to me, and i get off on improving myself as a programmer. decentralized is more elegant, more flexible, and more philosophically appealing…like torrents.

Someone pointed out below the [somewhat unfair] comparison of time based on using Subversion using the http protocol. Actually, there is something else that (IMHO) is misleading. In Subversion, if you’re disconnected from the Internet, you can still do “svn [add|remove|etc.]“. Only when you want to do a commit do you need an Internet connection. So, you can be away from the Internet and do heaps of adds, removes, etc. Likewise, you can do an “add” and then “remove” without doing a commit — the net effect is that what you wanted to add was never added.

While I get the point that with git, you have a copy of the repository, in the end, if you are away from the office and don’t have an Internet connection and your computer dies, you also lost everything. I mean, if you know what happens behind the scenes of git and Subversion, I can see git has advantages; but if you think about it as “is my work safely put away?” or “can others see my work?”, then the answer has nothing to do with Subversion or git — it has more to do with whether you’re connected to the Internet.

Anyway, nice article (really!). Before I decide, I might find an article on why I shouldn’t switch. :-)

Of course, there is much more to Git as the author points out. (By the way, very nice article)

But I recommend you to read a book so that you understand Git’s philosophy and how exactly it works before using it (make sure you understand what is index and what is staging). I read the book “Version control with Git”. I liked it very much.

The real important people to listen to are the ones who have used both. Here and in other blogs there are stories from people who’ve gone SVN -> GIT and then back to SVN. That speaks volumes.

I don’t really buy the ‘SVN is hard to use’ line by many Git promoters. What’s so hard to use about SVN? What’s so bad about having a central repository? Isn’t that just smart revision control design anyway?

Now off to read that book you did on using Git…

SVN does everything I’ll ever need from a version control system and it does it well. I won’t be switching all of my projects to Git for that reason, the benefits just aren’t there for me.