Friday, June 8, 2012

My opinion on GIT vs. SVN


I finally decided to convert to git...
Yes, this sounds like a religious statement (just like saying "i'm converting to christianity, judaism or islam") because it is!

Let me give some background -
At my work, we have a main svn repository, and we used to all use subversion (with Tortoise SVN and ankhSvn for VS compatibility). This was all great, until one day, some people decided that git is so much better than svn and they started convincing the others to try it out. So some of us did (or more accurately, attempted to try it out) by installing git extensions. In case you're not familiar, git extensions is a windows gui for git that is extendable so there's a plugin called git-svn that allows you to work git-based while actually having a svn server in the background. I went along and did just the same a couple of weeks ago. I also hosted a personal project on github to get the feeling of working with a real git repository (and not just using git-svn).

I must say, that working with git, is great!
...But also working with svn was great!
If i try to look back on it, I don't really remember the same people that are fans of git complaining about using svn the way they "claim" to have been complaining about it now. I think their more in love with the "coolness" of using git, since it seems like the cooler trend now-a-days.
Github has become so popular lately, and not for nothing - Their website is really easy and comfortable to use, and they have great tools for socializing and communicating on distributed projects over the internet. With that said, if they were hosting svn as well, I don't think it would be that big a difference.

All in all, git is great, but has it's share of problems. Svn has it's totally different share of problems as well. If there's a really good reason for me convincing you to start using git, it's because I truly believe that great developers should be well aware of the advantages and disadvantages each tool set gives you and that it's always good learning to use a new tool every once in a while. That's the only way to make the decision on which tools are best for you or your project.

Git and SVN are completely different in how they work, and it's really interesting to dig deep in to..
Here's a great post I read a while ago, that explains it really good : Understanding Distributed Version Control Systems

2 comments:

  1. May the shining spirit of Git have mercy on your soul, and let you see the light before it is too late.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Both tools are great, and there's a way to use both on the same server: SubGit. It provides both Git and SVN interfaces continuously synchonizing (in concurrency-safe fashion, of course). I'm one of SubGit developers, so it would be interesting to hear more feed-back about it before we release.

    ReplyDelete