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Comment by taco_emoji | Hacker News Reader

Git being distributed means you can use it without any centralized "master"--your local repository contains the entire history.

And if git seems too difficult to start with, Subversion can also "host" a repository on the file system, in a directory separate from your working directory.

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Agreed with this, SVN (short for subversion) is a good alternative.

I understood and was comfortable with SVN within a few minutes (using the TortoiseGit front-end, which I highly recommend).

I wrestled with git for months and at the end still feel I haven't subdued it properly. I can use it reliably but SVN is just so much friendlier.

So my suggestion is go with SVN + TortoiseGit. SVN is your butler. Git is a hydra that can do so much, once you've tied it down and cut off its thrashing heads.

It's not just me, our whole (small) company moved to it it burnt too much of our time and mental resources.

Edit: after learning TortoiseGit, learn the SVN command line commands (it's easy), and learn ASAP how to make backups of your repository!

SVN is easy, Git is simple.

Getting started with SVN is very quick, but once you need to peek under the hood, you'll find out it's super complicated inside.

Git is just the other way around: the interface is a mess, but the internals are simple and beautiful. Once you understand four concepts (blobs, trees, commits, refs), the rest falls into place.

Recommended four page intro to git internals: https://www.chromium.org/developers/fast-intro-to-git-intern...

I'll check your link, thanks.

Could you explain what you mean by svn being super complicated inside? I presume you mean from a user's not a programmer's perspective; I never found it confusing, ever.

It has it's flaws (tags are writable, unless that's been cured) but it's really pretty good, and far better than git for a beginner IMO.

I meant that SVN's internal concepts and workings are not simple. It's easy to use in the beginning, but it becomes difficult to even understand what's going on when you get into some kind of a tricky or unusual situation.

In Git, no matter how strange the situation, everything is still blobs, trees, commits, and refs. There are very few concepts used in Git, and they're simple and elegant.

SVN to Git is like WordPress to Jekyll - WordPress is easier to use than Jekyll, but Jekyll is simpler than WordPress.

I'm afraid I've still no idea what you mean. I've had plenty of confusion with git, and none that I can ever recall with SVN.

SVN's concepts are straightforward - commit stuff, branch, branches are COW so efficient, history is immutable unlike git (for better or worse) erm, other stuff. Never got confusing.

I'm not sure what you mean by SVN being super complicated? I've been using and administering it for years and it's just as straightforward as git (if a little easier because centralization is simpler to grok than decentralization).

Did you mean TortoiseSVN? TortoiseGit is a frontend for git, as the name implies, AFAIK it doesn't work with SVN at all.

(cringes)

Yes, I did. Thanks.

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