Advantages of git over SVN?

[vuurrobin]

I have noticed that alot of project moves to git for version management. What are the advantages of git versus other version management systems like svn?

[WinterMute]

Not quite sure what you mean by a lot of project moves, whether it's all the new git repos for devkitPro or projects in general switching to git.

git is better than svn for a whole bunch of reasons really.

It's a distributed VCS which means that the entire project history is stored in every clone - i.e. every developer with a clone of a git repository has access to the entire history whether or not they have an internet connection. This also means that there's no single point of failure - if for some horiible reason SF managed to lost the devkitPro repositories then we can just reinitialise a bare repository back up there and just push one of the clones to get all the history back.

Branching in git takes basically no time at all so it's really quick and easy to start a branch for testing that you can commit to without the worry of messing up the repository for anyone else. Your changes on that branch don't even have to be public because git maintains a local repository you commit to which then gets pushed to the remote repo later.

There's a really good article at http://thinkvitamin.com/code/why-you-sh ... on-to-git/

You don’t have to mess up the mainline just to save your experimental ideas, you don’t have to be online to do it and most importantly, you can context switch almost instantly.

[vuurrobin]

Yes I meant projects in general.

Thanks for the comments and link, they were really helpfull.

[mtheall]

Git is pretty awesome if you're willing to take the time to become a git guru. I found it to have a bit of a learning curve though, and I was trying to use it like I used subversion, which is not really a good way to think about git.

[Izhido]

I know it is actually unrelated to SVN vs git, yet... I miss the really cool search & browse functionality that the SVN repository had, that somehow got lost in the git move