Hacker News Reader

Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

SVN has much simpler concepts and a much smaller "surface area" to learn because it is a centralized versioning system. If you don't need the features of a distributed versioning system then there's little reason for using git (apart from "everybody's using git", which of course may be the strongest reason to adopt it too).

View on HN

Git branching and merging vastly out classes svn, coupled with its ability to version directory deletes and renames which svn struggled with, it makes much more sense than svn.

Most SVN workflows did not use branching and merging, becuase it was such a pain in the ass with SVN.

You folks are right about the confusion between git and the workflow, most folks use gitflow which uses master, develop and feature branches. Others like gitlabflow are quite different, but still make use of git's far better branching and merging.

Correction: Most company workflows did not use branching and mandatory code review because they started 10+ years ago and that was not widespread practice at the time... for a variety of reasons.

Usability has always been a problem as well as tooling support (merging algorithms really used to suck and generate conflicts all over the place, not specific to SVN or to git). Git made some things easier and some things harder. I'd personally rather have a sane command line interface (that I use every day) than the ability to track a rename twice a year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com