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Learning Git, And Should You Switch from SVN

If you are just learning to use git, or you have been using it for a while without too much thinking, this introduction to Git principles provides a fantastic overview into the concepts behind git, using a very simple and natural examples. Do you need to switch to git from svn? My personal take on this is as follows:
  • If you have several developers far away with bad internet connection, then YES.
  • If you have more than several developers (say hundreds) then YES.
  • If your developers often work on long multi-day features, where they want to commit often, but commits may result in instability of their branch, then YES. Git allows much easier branching than SVN.
  • If you want to leverage GitHub's infrastructure for hosting your project privately or publicly, then YES.
To balance this and not to appear as I am advocating everyone to switch, here is the reverse:
  • If you have a small team who works locally and uses a local SVN server then NO.
  • If your team does not need branching, or prefers to check-in complete features instead of incremental check-ins then NO.
  • If your team is used to SVN and there are no major issues, then NO.
  • If your team is using SVN authorization module to create groups and grant them special access per subdirectory then NO. I am unaware of Git providing this level of access control.

Comments

Barce said…
Great post! I'd also say if you have more folks that don't know much about SSH or FTP, then ya, but there's git gui, so there's no excuse now.

http://engineeredweb.com/blog/10/2/smartgit-best-git-gui-so-far
Unknown said…
Good point, thanks for sharing the link!
pietro said…
The real question is whether to switch to git or mercurial!

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