Comment by einhverfr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by einhverfr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It is more complicated, and the complexity buys you (assuming you need it) an ability to relax certain limits of more traditional SCM solutions.

To be honest I don't find git to be better than svn for a lot of work, having worked with both. There are fundamentally different decisions made, such as:

1 it is a lot easier to forget to add a file in svn, but it is a lot easier to accidentally include a file you don't want in git.

2 workflow in svn is a lot more streamlined because you aren't dealing with a multi-stage synchronization between your repositories (I am assuming the reason you use version control is in part to collaborate).

Now, one thing I have started to get really into has been the combination of github and svn, which gives you a lot of the benefits of svn and git together. Now, it doesn't give you every benefit of git but it gives you enough of them to make things easier all around in many cases.

I really don't understand why you believe it's more complicated. Why do you say that?

ok:

Workflow with svn:

1. Edit some files.

2. svn commit -m "commit message" (ok, I add an svn up && before, but I consider that one step).

done

Workflow with git:

1. Edit some files

2. git commit

3. Review the message to see which files I actually want to add, if there is anything that needs to go into git ignore, etc.

4. Edit .gitignore as necessary

5. git add *

6. git commit -m "commit message"

7. git push

So for simple cases you have 3 times as many steps, for more complex cases you have more steps. Note that I usually push/pull from my own github repo and not a central one because that avoids a lot of other hassle (and then use pull requests for managing inter-repo changes, something github has done a nice job with).

Additionally absent this you have a significant likelihood that you end up with various files that aren't a part of your build environment (generated makefiles, backups of generated makefiles, built packages, etc) accidently pushed out to your central repo.

Only if you make git that complicated. Steps 2-6 can be replaced with:

git commit -m "commit message" file1 file2 ...

When you use a tool inefficiently, don't blame the tool.

That's still a lot more verbose than svn and even if you do that, you still have only managed to reduce the number of commands required from 3x to 2x what svn requires.

Also wouldn't you agree that git has a much steeper learning curve than svn? What is this due to if not the added complexity?

1) Edit some files 2) git commit -a -m "blah blah" 3) git push

So, it adds one extra command to push things to an upstream git repository. But, this is the nature of being decentralized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com