Things I love about git

That's really cool, thanks for cluing me in.

But it looks like it's just limited support. Does it support all the github things like forks, pull requests, etc? Do you have a link to an SVN repo on github? I'd love to check one out.

That's absolutely right and a bit of functionality I had thought I had written up in my post. D'oh!

There's also `git add -p` that takes you straight into the patch mode.

Sure, there are tons of benefits to a central repository. I think that's actually what most people want from a VCS (IMHO). And you can set up policies that make Git act more like Perforce (but not so much the other way around).

The primary reason I switched my last employer from SVN to Git is because we frequently found ourselves in merge-conflict hell. Our workflow under Git was really very similar to our workflow under SVN.

It's worth noting that Git is often used as a centralized VCS. A central server is picked as the authoritative one (e.g. GitHub, or a server at your company) and the team pushes/pulls almost entirely to/from that server. In that common scenario, the difference between Git and whatever VCS it's replacing are really entirely in the UI.

Git was not originally meant as a VCS - it was meant to be a platform for other VCSs.

For that reason, you can essentially write a wrapper on top of git to turn it into a centralized VCS that acts similarly to Perforce/SVN/etc., by enforcing a certain workflow that essentially eliminates merge conflicts.

Of course, you lose a lot of the power of git when you do this (the same power that's responsible for many posts like these), but to cut a long story short: it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

One of the draw backs that typically gets mentioned about current distributed systems is the lack of locking which makes managing un-merge-able (binary) files impossible to manage correctly. This is why you will not hear of many game dev studios using git, version controlling art assets is fairly common in such situations and perforce handles it like a champ. DVCSs in general tend to have performance issues with large files, I know mercurial warns you about the performance implications of storing anything over 10MB.

A bit old(2009) so it may have changed, but here is a rant about the scalability of git vs perforce. http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=50 and a little newer post on git scalability issues: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3548824

There was a post last week that you might be interested in: https://steveko.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-ab...

No way! That's awesome. Thanks for the clue.

Aw, I thought for a second that was an actual subversion command. I don't doubt that the perl script handles it effectively though.

Ahh, that's awesome and I haven't seen it before.

I'll add that in later when I fix my omission of git add -p.

Yeah? That's awesome. Do you mean that the metadata fails to work with branches or that merging itself fails?

Merge metadata was recorded since the 1.5 releases of Subversion in 2006. As you mentioned, it's still not as nice as the way Git or Mercurial works. One nice thing about Subversion's branching model is that it is relatively easy to merge single revisions from one branch to another and have that information be recorded in merge metadata. In Git or Mercurial, you can cherry pick revisions by essentially duplicating them in a new location in the graph of revisions. This is annoying in scenarios like this:

       c--d--e
      /
  a--b
      \
       f

Now we want the change from commit d applied on the branch with head f so we cherry-pick the revision into place. This essentially applies the delta of revision d as a patch over revision f.

       c--d--e
      /
  a--b
      \
       f--d'

Now we make another change (rev g)and then decide that what was done in revision d was incorrect, so we undo those changes (rev h).

       c--d--e
      /
  a--b
      \
       f--d'--g--h

Now we decide that we want to merge branch with head e into branch with head h.

       c--d--e----
      /           \
  a--b             i
      \           /
       f--d'--g--h

In Git or Mercurial, the change originally made in revision d (and later undone in revision h) will appear in revision i. Subversion won't make this mistake because when revision d will already be marked as merged into that branch.

I'm much happier with the DAG model of Git and Mercurial than I was with the Subversion branching model, but the DAG model is not universally superior.

Yeah, I should say "no github pull requests".