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Comment by jacobscott | Hacker News Reader

For me, there's a modest amount of activation energy associated with trying a new SCM. For work, there's an INCREDIBLY large amount of activation energy to move all of the developers, scripts, etc, off svn (although we don't develop open source).

I think "you just need to try it" is the wrong approach. I want to know /why/ I should try it. I want to see my work flows called out and the minutes/hours I will save by switching from svn to git explained clearly. Svn certainly has its pain points, but I haven't seen a concise, easily digestible outline of what git (or its ilk) will get me.

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Branching off of your argument, there's a significant amount of activation energy to start a new svn repo, compared to mercurial or git. I find that when all I need to do upfront is type "hg init", I end up using VC for far more. For example, all the dotfiles in my home directory, my window manager setup (a somewhat-patched dwm), and my bin dir are in an hg repo. It makes "moving in" to a new computer (and syncing with my laptop) much easier.

You can use mercurial as if it were svn, just an svn that isn't a pain in the ass to set up, and that makes free backups for you automatically. Anything past that is just a bonus.

  andrew-desktop:~/x> svnadmin create ~/repo/x
  andrew-desktop:~/x> svn import file:///home/andrew/repo/x/trunk
  Adding         y
  Adding         y/example.yy
  Adding         example.txt
  
  Committed revision 1.

Sure, it's about 10 times as many keystrokes, but it's not a great burden.

Actually there is zero effort required to use git in an environment that already uses svn, git integrates incredibly well with svn.

"I want to know /why/ I should try it. I want to see my work flows called out and the minutes/hours I will save by switching from svn to git explained clearly."

Sounds like you're waiting for a salesperson. Good luck with that.

Maybe salesperson shouldn't be a dirty word then. I think the burden is on the creator (and or proponents) of software to explain to others why they should use it. Would you argue otherwise?

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