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Comment by yellowbkpk | Hacker News Reader

Having just spent the last month converting our operation to Git here at work, I can tell you the main force in keeping Subversion around are Windows users who are used to TortoiseSVN. There still is no viable Git UI for Windows (or any other OS, really -- but Windows is especially immature) and the people who make decisions a) use Windows and b) "don't have time" to learn git on the command line.

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The Jetbrains IDEs actually have excellent Git integration if that suits your purposes, which basically means Java (as many PHP, Python and Ruby programmers are married to simple text editors, emacs, vi, etc).

Now I like git but I can totally see why people don't use it (or in fact any DVCS). The central repository model is easily understood and implemented. The idea that there is no central "source of truth" is confusing--possibly even alarming--to an outsider.

Windows support problems for Git go beyond having no TortoiseSVN equivalent though. When I was setting this up I at first tried to get Git over SSH working with PuTTY and it a hair-pulling out experience. I eventually abandoned that effort in favour of Cygwin, which just worked.

Actually, I think Jetbrains RubyMine is a great IDE for Ruby and Rails apps too, so it's not just for Java. I love the Git integration because I haven't found a good Git GUI for Ubuntu.

That's exactly why we had to go with Mercurial instead of git. Their Windows integration is approaching SVN. Plus we were already using FogBugz. So, Kiln was a plus.

I had a coworker who was super resistant to switching to git because of the command line thing. I decided to give him a walkthrough in the hopes that I could answer any questions. You know what the problem turned out to be? He didn't know about tab-completion on the command line.

This is my big problem with Git. TortoiseSVN is extremely well done and fits nicely in my workflow. With Git it feels like a hack. W/o better tools support Git is probably dead on Windows and Mercurial win the Windows world.

Also Git's CR/LF issues on Windows are a pain. The fact that I've never seen an issue with them on any other SCCS, and they seem to cause headaches with Git is another reason it'll have trouble catching on in a big way.

How about TortoiseGit? http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/

I tried it a few months ago. I created a new repo and tried to add a file. It gave me an error. So I tried a different way of adding a file. It crashed hard.

TortoiseHg for Mercurial, on the other hand, is a pleasure to work with, especially the 2.0 release that just came out.

After spending days helping people recover from fetch/rebase and merges gone bad, I advise people to stay away from TortoiseGit altogether. Also, TortoiseGit makes no attempt to let Git's simplicity shine through. Why show a dialog box with a huge number of options when all I have to do at the command line is type "git commit -m'Foo'"?

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