SVN or git?

July 18, 2008 on 4:31 pm | In Uncategorized | By jason |

I’m starting a new project, and while it’s not very complex (ie I likely don’t need to use anything really special), I’d like to use a version control system. Right now, I know very little about how to use them. But I know at some point in my career (and likely soon!) I will need to know how to use such a tool to its fullest extent.

 

I’m going to go out of my way and assume most of you will say SVN because it’s what you know already, and that’s fine, too. Git is relatively knew and not fully understood, I think, but it’s becoming incredibly popular and I’ve heard great things about it.

 

So which is it?

12 Comments »

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  1. And don’t say Jazz.

    Comment by jason — July 18, 2008 #

  2. Hello fellow Canadian.

    You made the question easy. I don’t have to tell you why git is better than all the other SCMs, just why it’s better than subversion :)

    Git is decentralized which means that you don’t have to run a server. SVN server maintenance complicates things.

    Git grows with you; while SVN is very limited. There is a lot of flexibility, you can stick to the basic dozen commands, or learn more. Doing complex things in SVN is hard.

    Git is fast. No matter what you’re storing in git, it’s the most compact and the fastest SCM out there.

    Git *can* merge. SVN has issues merging two branches the second time, there is no such restriction in real SCMs.

    Want to see an intro, watch this…

    http://excess.org/article/2008/07/ogre-git-tutorial/

    Comment by bartman — July 18, 2008 #

  3. I only used Jazz for my project because SVN support in Eclipse was failing, and my project requires we use Eclipse. The Ubuntu CVS server was being stupid, so by the time I figure out how to set that up, I just extracted Jazz and we were off. As far as I know, Eclipse has not git support. Of course, if you’re not using Eclipse, you can use pretty much everything.

    Comment by QBasicer — July 18, 2008 #

  4. One of my colleagues in Ottawa develops Jazz. I understand why IBM might want Jazz… I don’t know why people outside of IBM would want Jazz. But I am not drinking the Eclipse koolaid, so maybe I’m missing something.

    Comment by bartman — July 18, 2008 #

  5. Both of us work for IBM in Ottawa :). I used it on my last co-op term there, and it’s pretty nice, and having the GUI to help set it up was a big plus. User control is a lot better too than I find in CVS/SVN.
    Also, bartman, your website link doesn’t work.

    Comment by QBasicer — July 18, 2008 #

  6. I’ll have to tell Evan he’s doing a good job.

    Comment by bartman — July 18, 2008 #

  7. BTW, there is a project to add git support to eclipse, but I don’t know how far along it is.

    http://repo.or.cz/w/egit.git

    Comment by bartman — July 18, 2008 #

  8. Cool, well I’m glad everyone listened when I said “don’t say Jazz” :P Good job. Yeah I work for IBM but I’m talking about a personal project. And it’s small so Jazz would be overkill anyway. I’m really looking to go opensource on this one because it seems to be one of the only places open source actually works like it’s supposed to.

    Comment by jason — July 18, 2008 #

  9. Oh, and I really do loathe Eclipse, even though I used to work on their dev team ;)

    Comment by jason — July 18, 2008 #

  10. If you want to host your project somewhere you can use github, gitorious, or git.or.cz.

    Comment by bartman — July 18, 2008 #

  11. I’ve been looking at using unfuddle.com it has hosting for both SVN and git, so I’m going to try that for my project. It’s also got an issue tracker and wiki, etc. Stuff like that. Do the sites you’ve mentioned allow for closed-source projects?

    Comment by jason — July 18, 2008 #

  12. I think github can be closed source. But not the others.

    Comment by bartman — July 18, 2008 #

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