Re: conversion to git

[Russ Allbery]

Andrej Prsa <address@hidden> writes:

> Specifically, I did switch from CVS to Subversion about a year ago and
> never regretted it. Now I would really like to learn what people have to
> say about git.

Branching and merging are spectacular.  That's the main thing in git that
really impressed me, and that I think is the killer feature.  Branches are
no longer the huge pain in the ass that they are with CVS, or even the
separate world thing they are with Subversion.  You can branch all over
the place and merge your branches together trivially.  You can be working
on one thing, stick it on a branch, switch back to a virgin source tree,
start working on something else, finish it, commit it, and switch back to
your original branch and trivially merge back in the work you'd done
since.

It's distributed, which means that you get first-class support for
multiple contributors.  So, for example, in places where with Subversion
someone would either develop a patch against a release tarball or check
out an anonymous repository and then mail a patch, git has first-class
tools for giving them their own repository, keeping track of their
changes, and helping them mail in patches or even publish their branch for
pulls.

The main drawback for me, and this is mostly just due to my lack of
familiarity so far, is that I do things with Subversion hook scripts
(there's another place where Subversion is night and day better than CVS),
and while git has similar mechanisms, I don't know how they work.  Also,
this is purely cosmetic, but I really *hate* the checksum identifiers
compared to Subversion's simple revision numbers.  I understand why the
model works better with them, but bleh.  It eats up a ton of space and
white noise in any sort of report that you get out of git.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>