Re: Git vs SVN (was: Can we improve things?)

["Kalle Vahlman" <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

2007/9/8, Olav Vitters <olav bkor dhs org>:
> On Sat, Sep 08, 2007 at 05:56:38AM -0400, Kevin Kubasik wrote:
> Let's summarize it as: I don't know any D-SCM :-) (only investigate by
> checking out docs)
> (but I am also not interested in learning a SCM)

Hopefully that doesn't translate "I don't know and I don't care"...

> For me, I consider the "you don't change directories for each branch you
> make" a drawback. I find directories as branches easier to understand (I
> hated this in CVS).

There's some tools to visualize the branch history in git, which
includes more information than just "this is a branch".

> > mkdir projdir && cd projdir
> > git clone ssh://kkubasik git gnome org/git/coolproject/kkubasik
> > git branch newcoolfeature
> > git checkout newcoolfeature
>
> I don't like this checkout step.

You can merge it with the branch command if you like:

  git checkout -b newcoolfeature

> > <write an awesome feature>
> > git commit -a
>
> Is the confusing way removed? If I do git-<TAB> I see 'Display all 144
> possibilities'. Why so many?

Because that's how git is structured. It's a collection of little
tools to do specific tasks. You'll likely use 4-5 of them in normal
developer tasks. Also, invoking 'git' gives you the most common ones.
If you do svn<TAB> there's only one useful command out of 9 (on my
machine) and it doesn't tell what it does either just by looking at
the name. Does that really mean anything?

And furthermore, looking at git commands is absolutely the worst way
to start learning git. Specially when coming from SVN, git commands as
they are will make no sense at all. But, when you read up and look at
few pretty pictures about how git works (like in
http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/ ), they start
to make sense and you'll see how they turn SCM from just storing
snapshots of file states to actual tool for managing a project and
it's changes.

And this all is naturally from the developer/maintainer POV, as
translators and documentors do not benefit from this as much. But as
the general opinion seems to be, they shouldn't be forced to use SCM:s
directly anyway.

> Easy stuff should be easy, hard stuff
> should be harder (otherwise the easy stuff is confusing). I never liked
> CVS, but I like SVN.. easy to understand.

There was great commotion about people not wanting to switch to svn
because they had to learn new SCM. I bet nobody today wants to go back
to CVS though, and it is bound to be the same for the next step too...

> Anyway, I think you forgot the 'push'.
>
> > Now you have 2 branches (the original, and newcoolfeature) where new
> > cool feature has your changes.
>
> Is it easy enough if you want to avoid branches? I usually work on
> trunk, nothing else (I do understand people want better merging than
> available in SVN).

Even more pleasant as you "own" the cloned repo and nothing happens on
the central server until you really want it to.

But I guess that's for the "newbie-committee" to decide if there ever
will be one...

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi
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