Upgrade to Git

Fri, Dec 30, 2011 2-minute read

Remember when Subversion was the new tool that all the cool kids were flocking to? Well, Subversion is now the old and busted, and it’s time to move to Git.

It’s time to upgrade your Subversion repo (if your still using it) to Git because of the benefits you will gain from moving to a more flexible tool.

  1. Distributed: When you checkout (or clone in the git world) a repository, you are checking out all the files in the repository, which means you can work independently of others. You can commit and make changes on master, or another branch without imposing your incomplete changes on the rest of the team.
  2. Simple Merging: Compared to Subversion, merging is fun. Because its so easy, as a developer you are more inclined to make additional branches and use them as they should be used. This adds a lot of flexibility in where and when the changes are pushed to master.
  3. Speed: A subversion commit doesn’t end until all the files have been transferred to the remote server, with git, commits are completed instantly because you are committing to the local repository, not the remote one. Therefore, you don’t have to wait for actions to complete as they are almost instantaneous.

I could go on, but those are the big ones for me. Note: I’m not against other DVCS systems like Mercurial, Bazaar, but I chose Git because of it’s popularity and ability to handle the Linux kernel.

Download GIT now.