Comments | prog: Question for the hackers

prog

Question for the hackers

Feb 05, 2009 19:52

I've been using Subversion since 2005 or so, and do not knowingly find it lacking in any particular way.

Should I care about Git? All I know about Git so far is that "everyone" is suddenly using it.

hivemind, programming

Comments 11

radtea February 6 2009, 02:56:08 UTC

I've been having the same feeling. Suddenly Git is cool, and my quick look at the docs suggests that it uses a quite different underlying model than SVN/CVS/RCS, which is a Good Thing, but I'm not sure it's worth the pain and suffering of switching over, especially for clients where I'm often working with more junior people who find TortoiseSVN just the thing.

I'll be interested to hear what you find.

temvald February 6 2009, 02:56:25 UTC

I've been using Mercurial with Dreamwidth, and my impression is that Git is a lot like it. It does have some neat features--it's nice to be able to, say, create a patch that lets me run in 32-bit on my laptop, and then just do a 'remove local patches; update; reapply local patches'. But I'm not sure that there would be much of a win in using it for a corporate project, where there needs to be a single canonical codebase that everyone uses.

...I don't know how helpful that is.

ex_colorwhe February 6 2009, 03:33:26 UTC

i like cheese.

prog February 6 2009, 04:02:06 UTC

Finally, an answer that makes sense.

prog February 6 2009, 05:05:03 UTC

Yeah, it sounds like sweet sauce for hackers, and I may look at it for my next from-scratch project. But it sounds like my clients won't be missing anything if I continue to recommend Subversion's use for their own stuff.

karlvonl February 6 2009, 03:03:06 UTC

I've never used git, but the one thing that that entices me to someday switch is the fact that it doesn't leave .svn (or equivalent) directories all over your working copy. This behavior of Subversion is especially annoying on the Mac, where several common file types, including Xcode project files, are actually packages, i.e. directories masquerading as files. I recently had a case where I discovered that an .app that I was building was full of .svn directories, until I changed the build script to export the skeleton .app from the repository instead of using the one right there in the working copy.

xach February 6 2009, 14:12:18 UTC

I've switched to git for most personal stuff. I like that it's super-cheap to start managing something with git: just git init, git add ., git commit.

I also like that it's easy, even while "offline", to do frequent commits on small improvements, and then step back and organize the commits into logical groups for sending to some canonical source.

Inertia is nice. People keep making nice new tools for git.

Github is pretty nice, as is git.or.cz.

xach February 6 2009, 14:12:41 UTC

Oh, and the magit integration with emacs is good and has the Emacs nature.

radiotelescope February 6 2009, 18:00:04 UTC

There's actually a planbeast task which I looked at and thought, "this would be easier with git." (I'd like to make the URL changes in a couple of stages, but with SVN this means breaking the dev site for an hour or so.)

Not leaving .svn turds everywhere would be awfully nice. I spend a lot of time grepping the source tree, and it's like "grep -r . | grep -v svn". (Or figuring out how to use "find", which is always just a little too painful.)