Why is Git better than Subversion?

Question

I've been using Subversion for a few years and after using SourceSafe, I just love Subversion. Combined with TortoiseSVN, I can't really imagine how it could be any better.

Yet there's a growing number of developers claiming that Subversion has problems and that we should be moving to the new breed of distributed version control systems, such as Git.

How does Git improve upon Subversion?

Answer 1

I have been dwelling in Git land lately, and I like it for personal projects, but I wouldn't be able to switch work projects to it yet from Subversion given the change in thinking of required from staff, without no pressing benefits. Moreover the biggest project we run in-house is extremely dependent on svn:externals which, from what I've seen so far, does not work so nicely and seamlessly in Git.

Answer 2

Easy Git has a nice page comparing actual usage of Git and SVN which will give you an idea of what things Git can do (or do more easily) compared to SVN. (Technically, this is based on Easy Git, which is a lightweight wrapper on top of Git.)

Answer 3

http://subversion.wandisco.com/component/content/article/1/40.html

I think it's fairly safe to say that amongst developers, the SVN Vs. Git argument has been raging for some time now, with everyone having their own view on which is better. This was even brought up in the of the questions during our Webinar on Subversion in 2010 and Beyond.

Hyrum Wright, our Director of Open Source and the President for the Subversion Corporation talks about the differences between Subversion and Git, along with other Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS).

He also talks about the upcoming changes in Subversion, such as Working Copy Next Generation (WC-NG), which he believes will cause a number of Git users to convert back to Subversion.

Have a watch of his video and let us know what you think by either commenting on this blog, or by posting in our forums. Registration is simple and will only take a moment!

Answer 4

David Richards WANdisco Blog on Subversion / GIT

The emergence of GIT has brought with it a breed of DVCS fundamentalists – the ‘Gitterons’ – that think anything other than GIT is crap. The Gitterons seem to think software engineering happens on their own island and often forget that most organizations don’t employ senior software engineers exclusively. That’s ok but it’s not how the rest of the market thinks, and I am happy to prove it: GIT, at the last look had less than three per cent of the market while Subversion has in the region of five million users and about half of the overall market.

The problem we saw was that the Gitterons were firing (cheap) shots at Subversion. Tweets like “Subversion is so [slow/crappy/restrictive/doesn't smell good/looks at me in a funny way] and now I have GIT and [everything works in my life/my wife got pregnant/I got a girlfriend after 30 years of trying/I won six times running on the blackjack table]. You get the picture.

Answer 5

I absolutely love being able to manage local branches of my source code in Git without muddying up the water of the central repository. In many cases I'll checkout code from the Subversion server and run a local Git repository just to be able to do this. It's also great that initializing a Git repository doesn't pollute the filesystem with a bunch of annoying .svn folders everywhere.

And as far as Windows tool support, TortoiseGit handles the basics very well, but I still prefer the command line unless I want to view the log. I really like the way Tortoise{Git|SVN} helps when reading commit logs.

Answer 6

Subversion is still a much more used version control system, which means that it has better tool support. You'll find mature SVN plugins for almost any IDE, and there are good explorer extensions available (like TurtoiseSVN). Other than that, I'll have to agree with Michael: Git isn't better or worse than Subversion, it's different.