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Comment by mru | Hacker News Reader

He seems to be saying that svn is better than git because _some_ git users have a central repository they work against, and because they are planning on adding some features that might to some extent allow them to mimic a few things git already can do. That's just about the weakest argument for svn over git I've ever heard.

Then the went on to use the word "enterprise" about 10 times in 30 seconds. Not convincing.

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The whole centralized vs distributed debate does not make much sense anyway, the choice of words is very poor. You almost always want to work on a common repository when working with other people - but the whole point of DVCS is that this common repository can be different for different usages (release vs development vs documentation vs testing ...). Something like subversion makes it very difficult to have several full fledge, synchronized repositories. Once you have a way to easily replicate live repo on the fly, you have already almost everything needed for a DVCS.

Also, something which is often overlooked: subversion was very poor even before DVCS came to light. It was only good at making sure everybody could work on the same snapshot. Branch management was inexistent not so long ago, no usable merge capabilities, awful interface to compare branches, etc... Just using git as a client to svn repository through git-svn already brings many advantages. Git-svn has saved me countless hours already compared to straight svn when working on public projects, especially for release management. svn log, blame, diff are slow to the point of being useless once you need to compare past revisions.

As an "enterprise" SVN user, I have to say I hate SVN "in the enterprise". Who the hell would want to rely on one repository in one location for all their writes? Not to mention delays in syncing changes read-only upstream creating confusion and loss in productivity for remote devs.

The HTTP method seems to be one of the most common uses in the "enterprise" because of its flexibility, but it's also the most buggy (in my experience). I know 'wandisco' makes its money off fixing all the typical "enterprise" problems with SVN, but we don't pay for 'wandisco' so we don't have the luxury of a proprietary fix for an open-source problem.

I have not used git. But the fact that it is distributed makes me want to try it a whole lot more.

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