Subversion 1.8 Released But Will You Still Use Git? 378
darthcamaro writes "Remember back in the day when we all used CVS? Then we moved to SVN (subversion) but in the last three yrs or so everyone and their brother seems to have moved to Git, right? Well truth is Subversion is still going strong and just released version 1.8. While Git is still faster for some things, Greg Stein, the former chair of the Apache Software Foundation, figures SVN is better than Git at lots of things. From the article: '"With Subversion, you can have a 1T repository and check out just a small portion of it, The developers don't need full copies," Stein explained. "Git shops typically have many, smaller repositories, while svn shops typically have a single repository, which eases administration, backup, etc."'"
Major new features of 1.8 include switching to a new metadata storage engine by default instead of using Berkeley DB, first-class renames (instead of the CVS-era holdover of deleting and recreating with a new name) which will make merges involving renamed files saner, and a slightly simplified branch merging interface.
Both Have Their Purposes (Score:4, Interesting)
I started using Git last year for my personal projects. It's a fantastic platform for coding as a social-network. I love that I can grab code I need from other developers around the world, tweak it, and send it back with a few suggestions. I love that I can follow other projects without having to get involved. Git is awesome.
That being said, we still use SVN for our internal development. The WYSIWYG interface of Tortoise is simply really comprehensive. I realize that Git offers more options, but if those options aren't available with a simple right-click, then I don't have the time for them. Tortoise SVN makes everything readily available, while Git makes me run to the command line too often.
Re:GIT sucks on windows (Score:5, Interesting)
If you live in linux land and love using only command line, then GIT is fine. On the other hand, if you want to grab the latest code, make a change and commit, GIT sucks. It's especially true if you're using Github. Having to rebase is tiresome, especially on windows. The times I've contributed to OSS projects that used GIT, I spent 5 minutes make the code change and 30 minutes rebasing. For comparison, with SVN, I spend 1 minute to do update and 5 minutes to make the code change.
What about Mercurial? (you know, the DVCS that fanbois dis because it's not used by Linus the ultimate cool kid). I'm considering switching from Subversion to something else for my team at work, but the Git UI is awful. I've heard Mercurial is better, including its GUI integration (e.g. Tortoise).
P.S. To put a little damper on the flame war that this will ignite, I swear that personally I would give my left kidney to crawl over broken glass for the privilege of reading man pages all night just to be able to do the same thing with Git that I could figure out in 5 minutes with any other version control system. However, other people on my team are very good at what they do (Ph.D.'s working on signal processing) but are not quite as enthusiastic as I about the broken glass.
Re:GIT sucks on windows (Score:3, Interesting)
TortoiseGit is a flaming pile...it tries too hard to look like TortoiseSVN, and so it just ends up being confusing. There are a number of alternative gui git clients for windows, of which Sourcetree [sourcetreeapp.com] is my current favorite, but not by much (I don't like it as much as either TortoiseSVN or TortoiseHg).
To the gp, if you're on windows, I'd give mercurial the edge, based on both UI and general mindset. Git is very much a product of linux, and so it makes some assumptions that aren't correct if you're on windows. On the other hand, github is both amazing and unique (bitbucket tried to do the same thing for hg, but it's not nearly as nice a social scene). And if you're trying to develop marketable skills (probably a good idea in our industry), git experience will most likely take you farther than hg experience.
Re:GIT sucks on windows (Score:4, Interesting)
What about Mercurial?
Mercurial matches Git in functionality and performance, but completely blows it away in terms of usability and elegant design. Without the Linus factor, everybody would be using Mercurial, not Git. I tend to use Mercurial a lot anyway. One weird and useful thing I do with Mercurial is make a Mercurial repository inside a Git repository, to track files I don't want in the Git repo but still want to track and keep in the same directory.
Re:Different strokes for different folks (Score:5, Interesting)
I find that using git-svn [kernel.org] with a central SVN repository results in a very nice workflow. In my local git repository, I'm free to develop in a nonlinear, exploratory fashion. At logical stopping points, this work gets neatly reconciled with reality in the form of sensical SVN commits. It's the best of both worlds, and allows me to do useful work even on an airplane.
Re:It's GIT for OSS, SVN for Enterprise. (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea of Git eludes you. You don't structure Git projects in a giant directory tree.
The first problem here is that you need to decide, up front, what your structure should be. For pretty much any large project that I've worked on, the correct structure is something that's only apparent 5 years after starting, and 5 years later is different. With git, you have to maintain externals if you want to be able to do a single clone and get the whole repository. Atomic commits (you know, the feature that we moved to svn from cvs for) are then very difficult, because you must commit and push in leaf-to-root order in your git repository nest.