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

Git in Windows is quite well supported now.

Check out GitExtensions = http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/

and the manual for a better Windows Git experience.

Answer 2

Thanks to the fact it doesn't need to communicate with a central server constantly, pretty much every command runs in less than a second (obviously git push/pull/fetch are slower simply because they have to initalise SSH connections). Branching is far far easier (one simple command to branch, one simple command to merge)

Answer 3

"Why Git is Better than X" outlines the various pros and cons of Git vs other SCMs.

Briefly:

• Git tracks content rather than files
• Branches are lightweight and merging is easy, and I mean really easy.
• It's distributed, basically every repository is a branch. It's much easier to develop concurrently and collaboratively than with Subversion, in my opinion. It also makes offline development possible.
• It doesn't impose any workflow, as seen on the above linked website, there are many workflows possible with Git. A Subversion-style workflow is easily mimicked.
• Git repositories are much smaller in file size than Subversion repositories. There's only one ".git" directory, as opposed to dozens of ".svn" repositories (note Subversion 1.7 and higher now uses a single directory like Git.)
• The staging area is awesome, it allows you to see the changes you will commit, commit partial changes and do various other stuff.
• Stashing is invaluable when you do "chaotic" development, or simply want to fix a bug while you're still working on something else (on a different branch).
• You can rewrite history, which is great for preparing patch sets and fixing your mistakes (before you publish the commits)
• … and a lot more.

There are some disadvantages:

• There aren't many good GUIs for it yet. It's new and Subversion has been around for a lot longer, so this is natural as there are a few interfaces in development. Some good ones include TortoiseGit and GitHub for Mac.
• Partial checkouts/clones of repositories are not possible at the moment (I read that it's in development). However, there is submodule support. Git 1.7+ supports sparse checkouts.
• It might be harder to learn, even though I did not find this to be the case (about a year ago). Git has recently improved its interface and is quite user friendly.

In the most simplistic usage, Subversion and Git are pretty much the same. There isn't much difference between:

svn checkout svn://foo.com/bar bar
cd bar
# edit
svn commit -m "foo"

and

git clone [e-mail]:foo/bar.git
cd bar
# edit
git commit -a -m "foo"
git push

Where Git really shines is branching and working with other people.

Answer 4

Subversion is very easy to use. I have never found in the last years a problem or that something doesn't work as expected. Also there are many excellent GUI tools and the support for SVN integration is big.

With Git you get a more flexible VCS. You can use it the same way like SVN with a remote repository where you commit all changes. But you can also use it mostly offline and only push the changes from time to time to the remote repository. But Git is more complex and has a steeper learning curve. I found myself in the first time committing to wrong branches, creating branches indirectly or get error messages with not much informations about the mistake and where I must search with Google to get better informations. Some easy things like substitution of markers ($Id$) doesn't work but GIT has a very flexible filtering and hook mechanism to merge own scripts and so you get all things you need and more but it needs more time and reading of the documentation ;)

If you work mostly offline with your local repository you have no backup if something is lost on your local machine. With SVN you are mostly working with a remote repository which is also the same time your backup on another server... Git can work in the same way but this was not the main goal of Linus to have something like SVN2. It was designed for the Linux kernel developers and the needs of a distributed version control system.

Is Git better then SVN? Developers which needs only some version history and a backup mechanism have a good and easy life with SVN. Developers working often with branches, testing more versions at the same time or working mostly offline can benefit from the features of Git. There are some very useful features like stashing not found with SVN which can make the life easier. But on the other side not all people will need all features. So I cannot see the dead of SVN.

Git needs some better documentation and the error reporting must be more helpful. Also the existing useful GUIs are only rarely. This time I have only found 1 GUI for Linux with support of most Git features (git-cola). Eclipse integration is working but its not official released and there is no official update site (only some external update site with periodical builds from the trunk http://www.jgit.org/updates) So the most preferred way to use Git this days is the command line.

Answer 5

The funny thing is: I host projects in Subversion Repos, but access them via the Git Clone command.

Please read Develop with Git on a Google Code Project

Although Google Code natively speaks Subversion, you can easily use Git during development. Searching for "git svn" suggests this practice is widespread, and we too encourage you to experiment with it.

Using Git on a Svn Repository gives me benefits:

1. I can work distributed on several machines, commiting and pulling from and to them
2. I have a central backup/public svn repository for others to check out
3. And they are free to use Git for their own

Answer 6

One of the things about SubVersion that irks me is that it puts its own folder in each directory of a project, whereas git only puts one in the root directory. It's not that big of a deal, but little things like that add up.

Of course, SubVersion has Tortoise, which is [usually] very nice.