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Comment by ExpiredLink | Hacker News Reader

Check-in and check-out is all most people need to know who use a 'traditional' tool like CVS and SVN.

Totally. At my work, a team of 5 devs manage to version their 25 years old software (>10.000 files) using SourceSafe !

No branch, no merge, only a central repo and intelligent check-in/check-out. They are way more efficient than the agile-y teams working with Git/Mercurial.

How often do they release? Do they do hotfixes? Do they have UAT versions? I bet they would be just as efficient using git as they are using SourceSafe (whatever that is). That's because YOU choose how you use git.

Except when it breaks. And what about feature branching? I think the name "feature branch" is an implementation detail, but I really do like that Git enables me to "only ship features that are considered somewhat 'done'", so that I can ship often yet not ship half-finished work.

SVN and CVS make this notoriously difficult. So I need a DVCS. But those are all super complex. I think Git/Hg/etc are great innovation and obviously the step forward compared to SVN and friends, but I'm not convinced were there yet.

There has to be a way to get the major tangible advantages of Git with the ease of use of SVN.

Darcs. Super easy and has a formal theory behind it.

Good one, it actually looks really cool. I played with it last many years ago, when there was a notorious bug that occasionally, merges would take super long because the algorithm was exponential in nature. Do you know whether things have improved on that area?

Significantly. AFAIK there are still pathological cases where it'd take much time, but they are very rare.

[And to be fair: others don't have that problem only because their merging doesn't take into account the history.]

Nice to hear! I'm going to give it another roll.

Now that I'm picking your brain anyway, do you know if there's any (workable) way at all to combine a site like GitHub or Bitbucket with Darcs?

Make branches the exception instead of the rule, a.k.a. 'Trunk Based Development'. Just like Google and Facebook.

http://paulhammant.com/2013/04/05/what-is-trunk-based-develo...

How does svn make feature branching difficult?

svn branch is a "free" operation (branching doesn't use space), svn switch means you can hop between branches easily.

I can see how a dvcs is nicer to work with locally but I'd like to hear your struggles with svn.

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