Re: SVN' "complexity" :)

[Dr . Jürgen Sauermann]

I would like to share another anecdote with you.

Some years ago I worked for a company that forced me to use
git. I used to work from my home office and commit my changes
to the company's git repository. Needless to say that I use SVN
in my home office and I admit that I am not a git expert, not
even a frequent user (I avoid it where possible). On the other
hand I have  a 30-year working experience with various source
control systems (RCS, CVS, ClearCase, and now SVN).

One day I was supposed to do a simple fix of one or maybe
two lines of source code fix in a handful of files in the remote
git repository. Since the repository was rather large (and my
DSL line rather slow) I thought it would suffice to only check
out the sub-directory that contained the few files, fix and
recompile them to make sure the changes would work.

Next I pushed my small changes back to the remote git
repository. Minutes later I got a call from a colleague asking
why the hell I had removed almost all files in the git repository,
I can't explain what happened exactly, but after my git push
 the entire (!) remote git repository now only contained the
few files that I had changed and all other files were gone.

Luckily a git specialist in the company managed to restore
the deleted files (and therefore I was not fired) , but my
trust in git is severely damaged since then.

Best Regards,
Jürgen


On 5/25/23 23:56, vvs wrote:
> Following recent argument I just wanted to share that anecdote which
> happened to me right now. That way it would be closer to real life and
> more funny for you.
>
> First, some background. I used to locally mirror GNU APL' Subversion
> repository using rsync. That was long before it' Git mirror even
> existed. Today I've decided to update it, what I didn't do for quite
> some time. I was surprised to see that revisions 1519, 1601 and 1686
> together have about 1.7 GB in size! I've aborted that transaction and
> decided to fake those revisions in my local repository just to save
> disk space. It all failed for different reasons so I've decided to
> finally just use plain SVN workspace and ditch my local mirror for
> good. I could have used git --depth but this wouldn't buy me anything.
>
> Now, the story. To save some traffic, I did checkout from my local
> mirror first. Then I've tried to change the repository URL. I vaguely
> remembered that I should use a `switch` command. But that didn't work
> with an error explaining that URLs are different. Heck, but that's
> exactly why I've resorted to switch! Then I've noticed that there is
> --ignore-ancestry, which should have helped in that scenario. But it
> didn't help either. Then I gave up and just did a fresh checkout from
> a new URL. After googling some more I've finally found a documentation
> page which explained that I should have used `relocate` instead of
> `switch`. Also, --relocate option was deprecated which confused me
> even more. Well, too little too late already :) I've lost 0.5 GB of
> mobile Internet traffic, some time and yet I knew that in Git I should
> have only trivially changed repository' origin with `remote`.
>
> The obvious moral of this story is: I'm not an expert in SVN. You can
> lough. And well, that's the point: Git is just more familiar for me :)
>
> Have a nice day.