moving to git (was: moving to subversion)

Stefan Sperling stsp at stsp.in-berlin.de
Mon Sep 4 13:59:06 CEST 2006


On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 01:28:32PM +0200, Vapula wrote:
> >On the downside:
> >Committers will have to learn how to use git properly.
> >This takes a bit of time. The documentation is very good,
> >but uses very informal style with a couple of jokes thrown
> >in here and there. While this keeps things from getting
> >too boring, you have to get used to the style of the
> >documentation a bit before you know what is going on.
> SVN doesn't have that downside, my company recently switched to SVN from CVS
> over 2 days for more than 100 projects (and even more developers).
> Migration looked seamless, as you can keep the history of revisions from
> CVS.
> The main features are :
> - command-line client use mostly the same syntax for checkin/checkout as
> CVS, so there is virtually no learning curve
> - anonymous access is easy, through a simple web-like access and no auth
> needed. Checking out is way faster than CVS.
> - documentation is pretty good  (http://svnbook.red-bean.com/) and there are
> GUIs for it if you want (TortoiseSVN, ...)

I know svn relatively well from the user point of view.
I've used the svn client for projects at university.
I like subversion much better than cvs.  The concept of copying
directories to create branches is very interesting, albeit a bit
confusing at first if you come from cvs and expect "virtually no
learning curve" (I've tried to run svn tag, of course :)

But in my opinion git is more interesting for us, because:
	* It is supposed to be extremely efficient with large trees.
	  And our tree is very very very large.
	  I don't know how it compares to svn in terms of speed.
	  I could not find any numbers on google yet.
	  Malcolm already indicated once that git felt indeed very
	  fast while working on upstream Linux kernel patches.
	* It is designed to be as simple as possible, which appeals
	  a lot to me. Git is accessible, because you can easily
	  understand what it is doing. Subversion with its support
	  for multiple database backends etc. looks more complicated.
	* I already have an idea on how to set it up on our
	  main repository and the mirror. I don't know anything
	  about configuring svn on the server side yet.
	  
-- 
stefan
http://stsp.in-berlin.de                                 PGP Key: 0xF59D25F0



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