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Why Subversion is better than Git

subversion.wandisco.com

11–20 of 47 posts

Re: Why Subversion is better than Git

#11

They've ignored Git's superior branching scheme though. Once you use Git for a while and get a hang of branches, you won't want to go back to the Subversion way of doing it.

FWIW, I'm of the school of thought that branching is bad, causes mess, and should be hard.

Having said that, branching seems pretty simple in svn if you really like having them.

Re: Why Subversion is better than Git

#14
post #11

They've ignored Git's superior branching scheme though. Once you use Git for a while and get a hang of branches, you won't want to go back to the Subversion way of doing it.

FWIW, I'm of the school of thought that branching is bad, causes mess, and should be hard. Having said that, branching seems pretty simple in svn if you really like having them.

I believe that by "superior branching", DannoHung actually ment superior merging. That is something at which SVN is far, far behind DVCSs in general and GIT in particular.

Also, my experience, as non-representative as it is, has shown that cheap branching with efficient merging results in much less of a mess than everybody playing in the same sandbox and inevitably kicking everybody else's sand castles.

Re: Why Subversion is better than Git

#15
post #11

They've ignored Git's superior branching scheme though. Once you use Git for a while and get a hang of branches, you won't want to go back to the Subversion way of doing it.

FWIW, I'm of the school of thought that branching is bad, causes mess, and should be hard. Having said that, branching seems pretty simple in svn if you really like having them.

Branching was a pain for me when using SVN - far too much hassle to keep on top of it all; All branches are visible to everyone and merging between them was slow.

With Git, branching is simple and really fast. It can also be done in such a way as to prevent your own personal development and feature branches from making it back into the central repo.

I've also found that cherry picking commits between branches and squishing small commits help me maintain the cleanliness of our repos (At no point in the history of our central repo is there half of a new feature or fix).

Re: Why Subversion is better than Git

#16
post #11

They've ignored Git's superior branching scheme though. Once you use Git for a while and get a hang of branches, you won't want to go back to the Subversion way of doing it.

FWIW, I'm of the school of thought that branching is bad, causes mess, and should be hard. Having said that, branching seems pretty simple in svn if you really like having them.

Except that in subversion, branching is a great way to lose revision history. I think this is partly fixed with the merge tracking features in the more recent subversion, but in git it is simple - it just works like you'd expect.

Re: Why Subversion is better than Git

#17
Not for nothing, but Wandisco sells $1000/seat software that makes Subversion distributed (i.e. more like Git).

I checked it out about three years ago (before Git was on my radar) when the company I worked for brought on some offshore developers, and they were on a slow and unstable internet connection.

Re: Why Subversion is better than Git

#18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I'm of the school of thought that branching is bad, causes mess, and should be hard. Having said that, branching seems pretty simple in svn if you really like having them.

I believe that by "superior branching", DannoHung actually ment superior merging. That is something at which SVN is far, far behind DVCSs in general and GIT in particular. Also, my experience, as non-representative as it is, has shown that cheap branching with efficient merging results in much less of a mess than everybody playing in the same sandbox and inevitably kicking everybody else's sand castles.

> "everybody playing in the same sandbox and inevitably kicking everybody else's sand castles."

That just points to poor collaboration management etc though. If people don't work together properly, you're just delaying problems until people merge anyway.

Re: Why Subversion is better than Git

#20
Improving subversion borrowing some "distributed feature" from git&co? I'm not sure of how many would care... The thing that make svn a "toy" scm is the branching model/facilities(e.g. merge) and this is the area that seriously needs to be improved. Do you want to bring svn "to the enterprise"? Start offering what other enterprise scms offer, take clearcase for example, it has its issues but the branch/merge facilities are great.
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