Re: [boost] [git] Mercurial?

Subject: Re: [boost] [git] Mercurial?
From: David Bergman (David.Bergman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-03-20 21:40:44

Ed(ward), I can give you an anecdote, for DVCSes, though:

I spend around 50 hours in the air every month; yes, a full working week. I rarely have - or want - Internet access on those trips.

Git (and most other DVCSes) allows me to work revisioned, trying our various paths of development, during that working week.

Related, I like to test branches and ideas without having anyone else observing my moves or caring about what I do; so, I can do that, locally, instead of creating obscure or sacred branches in SVN in a common repository.

There are a bunch of more technical reasons why Git is superior to SVN, related to the snapshot representation of files and trees of files, and commits, instead of deltas (such as in SVN.) If a delta chain (or poset...) gets out of sync, you are kind of lost; very hard to recreate the current (or any) consistent state of files.

/David

On Mar 20, 2012, at 9:31 PM, David Bergman wrote:

> Technical? Well, both systems do track revisions...
> 
> This sounds like a "Turing Completeness" argument held by a Pascal programmer when hearing about that "cool" language called C a few decades ago.
> 
> Ask people who have extensively used both, and they will tell you. C is better. Period. Git is better.
> 
> There exists a simple litmus test for these kinds of comparisons: if a developer has used X and Y extensively and is to embark on a new venture, with no legacy or political ties enforcing one or the other; which one would he use? I am pretty certain that for X and Y being Git and SVN, the answer would dominantly be Git.
> 
> And, I am not a "cool programmer," unless you consider having developed code for 30+ years in 20 languages, commercially, cool.
> 
> /David
> 
> On Mar 20, 2012, at 8:41 PM, Edward Diener wrote:
> 
>> On 3/20/2012 7:03 AM, Julian Gonggrijp wrote:
>> ... snip
>>> 
>>> Well, allow me to present some fair reasoning to you.
>>> 
>>> With regard to git versus svn: I think enough fair reasons have been
>>> given why git (or a DVCS in general) is better than svn. I'm not
>>> going to repeat those arguments here.
>> 
>> I have never heard a single technical argument, in all the endless mentions of Git among the people riding that bandwagon, why Git is better than SVN, or even why any DVCS is better than a centralized SCCS. I consider this whole move to Git and/or DVCS among "hip" programmers little more than a move to conform with what others are doing and feel "cool".
>> 
>> I am perfectly willing to read well-chosen technical arguments but not from people already sold on one side or the other. But I really despair of anyone being able to present such arguments in the atmosphere created by Git fanatics and DVCS fanatics. The only thing I have gotten from all this is "I've tried it, I like it, and therefore its superior".
>> 
>> Feel free, anyone, to point me to a purely technical discussion, article, whatnot, explaining the practical reasons why using a DVCS, or Git, is more productive and more pleasurable than using a centralized SCCS like Subversion.
>> 
>> 
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