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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

I think there are a lot of people that use subversion.

Sure, and I'm one of them. It's not exactly startling news in 2012 that a lot of people prefer the git/hg model. Hell, I prefer it myself! But I've got a complete svn ecosystem set up here, with 44 projects in a single svn repository, automatic offsite backups, and hundreds of checked-out directories spread across five (or more?) computers with five distinct operating systems. As far as I can see, the one-time costs of moving over completely dwarf the relatively small benefits I would gain from using a better branching model.

I'm one of them as well. I'd also love to use git. The issue I have we it is that I feel like the "port" to Windows was more of a crowbar sort of operation rather than a well thought out plan to make a program cross-platform compatible.

Install TortoiseSVN. Done.

Install TortoiseHg. Oh it needs something else. What's it called? Ok. I need msysGit. I'll get that. Ok, they're all in beta? Whatever I'll just get one. What? It runs on top of Cywin? And on, and on...

Am I missing something here or is it really that convoluted? I work with non-programmers (engineering types) who program and I need it to be easy for them. Any recommendations?

The guide at github[0] is pretty easy to follow. I've done it on some of my fellow students' pc's a couple of times during a project, but most of them switched to Ubuntu after a couple of weeks.

[0]http://help.github.com/win-set-up-git/

This is a really great setup tutorial that I haven't seen before. Thanks!

I assume you meant TortoiseGit? Otherwise, I think I spot the problem.

(Just pointing out because TortoiseHg actually is fairly painless to install if you want to use Mercurial on Windows, and the typo might confuse some)

Wow. Yeah. TortoiseGit. Wherever my brain is I hope it's happy and it writes soon. Thanks!

Indeed there are. I'm using it right now for a contract job. SVN is just the way things are done there. Before that, they were using TFS.

At the risk of sounding like an elitist hipster hacker, the core audience of this site comes here looking to read articles about innovation, not staid, conservative companies slowly transitioning to established and proven technologies.

A common issue, especially with fast paced startups, is technical debt. This debt can show itself in various ways, and the underlying technology that one uses could be one of those debts. SVN was the popular choice in version control for a long time, and it wouldn't surprise me that there may have been startups that chose this because of comfort-ability in the technology, which has now become a technical debt that will need to be taken care of.

Just because you are an elitist hipster hacker, doesn't mean that this issue will only pertain to staid, conservative companies.

Even hipster hackers sometimes work for staid, conservative companies. Articles like this one give the hiphacks some ammo when they want to convince management.

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, that's the beauty of giving the power to the community to decide what is interesting to them. I wouldn't describe SecondMarket as a staid, conservative company, we use amazing open source technologies such as Solr, Scala, Akka, mongoDB, etc. in a very agile environment. We also like to think we are changing the way in which the financial markets are working. However svn was one technology we were stuck in the past with and we wanted to share that making such a basic change has made our life better.

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