[tpm] RFC: Which Centralized VCS[s] are you using now or in future?

[Olaf Alders]

On 2010-07-08, at 10:52 AM, Stuart Watt wrote:

> I know you don't want a contest, but Subversion is not as bad as described, really. I've used it for 7 years, our team used it for three now, and we have never had a real problem.
> 
> Having said what follows, starting today, I probably would use Git. The command names are not easy to grasp, but merging for complex non-hierarchically organized projects does appear to be very significantly better than Subversion. For a well-structured single project, though, Subversion is fine, stable, relatively efficient, and very widely supported. There are many good clients, some of which are "manager friendly".

I found Subversion much easier to get started with than Git.  It took me a while to wrap my head around Git, but once I did, it was hard to go back to Subversion.  My experience with branching in Subversion was that the merging seemed very hit and miss and I found that for a big merge, I'd be setting aside a few hours to try to untangle everything.  So, I would try to avoid branching where possible.  Using Git, branching and merging seems trivial, so it's no longer an issue.  

Also, GitHub is a great resource and with its system of pull requests, it makes it really easy to apply patches from people who have cloned your repository.  I find that if someone sends me a pull request for a module, I can have the patch applied and uploaded to CPAN in just minutes.  It's a no-brainer.  That's likely also due to the way GitHub works, but I think it's a good argument for Git since it makes my life easier.

What I do like about Subversion is how easy it is to commit with a username/password rather than an SSH key, which makes it easy for me to commit back to a repo from a machine (like a client's machine) where I don't have SSH keys.  Also, SVN::Notify messages are considerably prettier.  

If a project is working well in Subversion, there's probably no need to migrate to Git, but for new projects, I always choose Git.

Olaf
--
Olaf Alders
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