Should I use SVN or Git

Question

I am starting a new distributed project  Should I use SVN or Git  and why

User · Answer

SVN is one repo and lots of clients  Git is a repo with lots of client repos  each with a user  It s decentralised to a point where people can track their own edits locally without having to push things to an external server   SVN is designed to be more central where Git is based on each user having their own Git repo and those repos push changes back up into a central one  For that reason  Git gives individuals better local version control    Meanwhile you have the choice between TortoiseGit  GitExtensions  and if you host your  central  git-repository on github  their own client     GitHub for Windows    If you re looking on getting out of SVN  you might want to evaluate Bazaar for a bit  It s one of the next generation of version control systems that have this distributed element  It isn t POSIX dependant like git so there are native Windows builds and it has some powerful open source brands backing it   But you might not even need these sorts of features yet  Have a look at the features  advantages and disadvantages of the distributed VCSes  If you need more than SVN offers  consider one  If you don t  you might want to stick with SVN s  currently  superior desktop integration

User · Answer

I have used SVN for a long time  but whenever I used Git  I felt that Git is much powerful  lightweight  and although a little bit of learning curve involved but is better than SVN   What I have noted is that each SVN project  as it grows  becomes a very big size project unless it is exported  Where as  GIT project  along with Git data  is very light weight in size   In SVN  I ve dealt with developers from novice to experts  and the novices and intermediates seem to introduce File conflicts if they copy one folder from another SVN project in order to re-use it  Whereas  I think in Git  you just copy the folder and it works  because Git doesn t introduce  git folders in all its subfolders  as SVN does    After dealing alot with SVN since long time  I m finally thinking to move my developers and me to Git  since it is easy to collaborate and merge work  as well as one great advantage is that a local copy s changes can be committed as much desired  and then finally pushed to the branch on server in one go  unlike SVN  where we have to commit the changes from time to time in the repository on server    Anyone who can help me decide if I should really go with Git

User · Answer

It comes down to this   Will your development be linear  If so  you should stick with Subversion    If on the other hand  your development will not be linear  which means that you will need to create branching for different changes  and then merging such changes back to the main development line  known to Git as the master branch  then Git will do MUCH more for you

User · Answer

I would probably choose Git because I feel it s much more powerful than SVN  There are cheap Code Hosting services available which work just great for me - you don t have to do backups or any maintenance work - GitHub is the most obvious candidate   That said  I don t know anything regarding the integration of Visual Studio and the different SCM systems  I imagine the integration with SVN to notably better

User · Answer

Definitely svn  since Windows is   at best   a second-class citizen in the world of git  see http   en wikipedia org wiki Git  software  Portability for more details    UPDATE  Sorry for the broken link  but I ve given up trying to get SO to work with URIs that contain parentheses   link fixed now  -ed

User · Answer

I would set up a Subversion repository  By doing it this way  individual developers can choose whether to use Subversion clients or Git clients  with git-svn   Using git-svn doesn t give you all the benefits of a full Git solution  but it does give individual developers a great deal of control over their own workflow   I believe it will be a relatively short time before Git works just as well on Windows as it does on Unix and Mac OS X  since you asked    Subversion has excellent tools for Windows  such as TortoiseSVN for Explorer integration and AnkhSVN for Visual Studio integration

User · Answer

Not really answering your question but if you want the benefits of Distributed Revision Control - it sounds like you do - and you re using Windows I think you d be better off using Mercurial rather that Git as Mercurial has much better Windows support   Mercurial does have a Mac port too

User · Answer

Git is not natively supported under Windows  just yet  It is optimized for Posix systems  However running Cygwin or MinGW lets you run Git successful   Nowadays I prefer Git over SVN  but it takes a while to get over the threshold if you come from CVS  SVN land

User · Answer

SVN seems like a good choice under Windows  as pointed by other people   If some of your developper wants to try GIT  it may always use GIT-SVN where the SVN repository is recreated in a GIT repository  Then he should be able to work locally with GIT and then use SVN to publish its changes to the main repository

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

2 key advantages of SVN that are rarely cited    Large file support  In addition to code  I use SVN to manage my home directory  SVN is the only VCS  distributed or not  that doesn t choke on my TrueCrypt files  please correct me if there s another VCS that handles 500MB  files effectively   This is because diff comparisons are streamed  this is a very essential point   Rsync is unacceptable because it s not 2-way  Partial repository  subdir  checkout checkin  Mercurial and bzr don t support this  and git s support is limited  This is bad in a team environment  but invaluable if I want to check something out on another computer from my home dir    Just my experiences

User · Answer

The main point is  that Git is a distributed VCS and Subversion a centralized one  Distributed VCSs are a little bit more difficult to understand  but have many advantages  If you don t need this advantages  Subversion may the better choice   Another question is tool-support  Which VCS is better supported by the tools you plan to use   EDIT  Three years ago I answered this way      And Git works on Windows at the moment only via Cygwin or MSYS    Subversion supported Windows from the beginning  As the git-solutions   for windows may work for you  there may be problems  as the most   developers of Git work with Linux and didn t have portability in the   mind from the beginning  At the moment I would prefer Subversion for   development under Windows  In a few years this may be irrelevant    Now the world has changed a little bit  Git has a good implementation on windows now  Although I tested not thouroughly on windows  as I no longer use this system   I m quite confident  that all the major VCS  SVN  Git  Mercurial  Bazaar  have proper Windows-implementation now  This advantage for SVN is gone  The other points  Centralized vs  Distributed and the check for tool support  stay valid

User · Answer

I have never understand this concept of  git not being good on Windows   I develop exclusively under Windows and I have never had any problems with git   I would definitely recommend git over subversion  its simply so much more versatile and allows  offline development  in a way subversion never really could   Its available on almost every platform imaginable and has more features than you ll probably ever use

User · Answer

You have to go with a DVCS  it is like a quantum leap in source management   Personally I use Monotone and its sped up development time no end   We are using it for Windows  Linux and Mac and it has been very stable   I even have buildbot doing nightly builds of the project on each of the platforms     DVCS while being distributed usually means you will create a central server just for people to push changes to and from

User · Answer

There is an interesting Video on YouTube about this  Its from Linus Torwalds himself  Goolge Tech Talk  Linus Torvalds on git

User · Answer

have you tried Bzr   It s pretty good  connonical  the people who make Ubuntu  made it because they didn t like anything else on the market

User · Answer

I would opt for SVN since it is more widely spread and better known   I guess  Git would be better for Linux user

User · Answer

Here is a copy of an answer I made of some duplicate question since then deleted about Git vs  SVN  September 2009    Better  Aside from the usual link WhyGitIsBetterThanX  they are different   one is a Central VCS based on cheap copy for branches and tags the other  Git  is a distributed VCS based on a graph of revisions  See also Core concepts of VCS     That first part generated some mis-informed comments pretending that the fundamental purpose of the two programs  SVN and Git  is the same  but that they have been implemented quite differently  To clarify the fundamental difference between SVN and Git  let me rephrase    SVN is the third implementation of a revision control  RCS  then CVS and finally SVN manage directories of versioned data  SVN offers VCS features  labeling and merging   but its tag is just a directory copy  like a branch  except you are not  supposed  to touch anything in a tag directory   and its merge is still complicated  currently based on meta-data added to remember what has already been merged  Git is a file content management  a tool made to merge files   evolved into a true Version Control System  based on a DAG  Directed Acyclic Graph  of commits  where branches are part of the history of datas  and not a data itself   and where tags are a true meta-data    To say they are not  fundamentally  different because you can achieve the same thing  resolve the same problem  is    plain false on so many levels    if you have many complex merges  doing them with SVN will be longer and more error prone  if you have to create many branches  you will need to manage them and merge them  again much more easily with Git than with SVN  especially if a high number of files are involved  the speed then becomes important  if you have partial merges for a work in progress  you will take advantage of the Git staging area  index  to commit only what you need  stash the rest  and move on on another branch  if you need offline development    well with Git you are always  online   with your own local repository  whatever the workflow you want to follow with other repositories      Still the comments on that old  deleted  answer insisted      VonC  You are confusing fundamental difference in implementation  the differences are very fundamental  we both clearly agree on this  with difference in purpose    They are both tools used for the same purpose  this is why many teams who ve formerly used SVN have quite successfully been able to dump it in favor of Git    If they didn t solve the same problem  this substitutability wouldn t exist      to which I replied    substitutability     interesting term  used in computer programming   Off course  Git is hardly a subtype of SVN     You may achieve the same technical features  tag  branch  merge  with both  but Git does not get in your way and allow you to focus on the content of the files  without thinking about the tool itself   You certainly cannot  always  just replace SVN by Git  without altering any of the desirable properties of that program  correctness  task performed         which is a reference to the aforementioned substitutability definition     One is an extended revision tool  the other a true version control system  One is suited small to medium monolithic project with simple merge workflow and  not too much  parallel versions  SVN is enough for that purpose  and you may not need all the Git features  The other allows for medium to large projects based on multiple components  one repo per component   with large number of files to merges between multiple branches in a complex merge workflow  parallel versions in branches  retrofit merges  and so on  You could do it with SVN  but you are much better off with Git  SVN simply can not manage any project of any size with any merge workflow  Git can    Again  their nature is fundamentally different  which then leads to different implementation but that is not the point   One see revision control as directories and files  the other only see the content of the file  so much so that empty directories won t even register in Git       The general end-goal might be the same  but you cannot use them in the same way  nor can you solve the same class of problem  in scope or complexity

User · Answer

After doing more research  and reviewing this link  https   git wiki kernel org articles g i t GitSvnComparison cb82 html   Some extracts below     It s incredibly fast  No other SCM that I have used has been able to keep up with it  and I ve used a lot  including Subversion  Perforce  darcs  BitKeeper  ClearCase and CVS  It s fully distributed  The repository owner can t dictate how I work  I can create branches and commit changes while disconnected on my laptop  then later synchronize that with any number of other repositories  Synchronization can occur over many media  An SSH channel  over HTTP via WebDAV  by FTP  or by sending emails holding patches to be applied by the recipient of the message  A central repository isn t necessary  but can be used  Branches are even cheaper than they are in Subversion  Creating a branch is as simple as writing a 41 byte file to disk  Deleting a branch is as simple as deleting that file  Unlike Subversion branches carry along their complete history  without having to perform a strange copy and walk through the copy  When using Subversion I always found it awkward to look at the history of a file on branch that occurred before the branch was created  from  git   spearce  I don t understand one thing about SVN in the page  I made a branch i SVN and browsing the history showed the whole history a file in the branch Branch merging is simpler and more automatic in Git  In Subversion you need to remember what was the last revision you merged from so you can generate the correct merge command  Git does this automatically  and always does it right  Which means there s less chance of making a mistake when merging two branches together  Branch merges are recorded as part of the proper history of the repository  If I merge two branches together  or if I merge a branch back into the trunk it came from  that merge operation is recorded as part of the repostory history as having been performed by me  and when  It s hard to dispute who performed the merge when it s right there in the log  Creating a repository is a trivial operation  mkdir foo  cd foo  git init That s it  Which means I create a Git repository for everything these days  I tend to use one repository per class  Most of those repositories are under 1 MB in disk as they only store lecture notes  homework assignments  and my LaTeX answers  The repository s internal file formats are incredible simple  This means repair is very easy to do  but even better because it s so simple its very hard to get corrupted  I don t think anyone has ever had a Git repository get corrupted  I ve seen Subversion with fsfs corrupt itself  And I ve seen Berkley DB corrupt itself too many times to trust my code to the bdb backend of Subversion  Git s file format is very good at compressing data  despite it s a very simple format  The Mozilla project s CVS repository is about 3 GB  it s about 12 GB in Subversion s fsfs format  In Git it s around 300 MB    After reading all this  I m convinced that Git is the way to go  although a little bit of learning curve exists   I have used Git and SVN on Windows platforms as well   I d love to hear what others have to say after reading the above

User · Answer

If your team is already familiar with version and source control softwares like cvs or svn  then  for a simple and small project  such as you claim it is   I would recommend you stick to SVN  I am really comfortable with svn  but for the current e-commerce project I am doing on django  I decided to work on git  I am using git in svn-mode  that is  with a centralised repo that I push to and pull from in order to collaborate with at least one other developer   The other developer is comfortable with SVN  and while others  experiences may differ  both of us are having a really bad time embracing git for this small project   We are both hardcore Linux users  if it matters at all    Your mileage may vary  of course

User · Answer

May I expand on the question and ask if Git work well on MacOS   Reply to Comments  Thanks for the news  I d been looking forward to trying it out  I ll install it at home on my Mac

[git] Should I use SVN or Git?

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