Learn Git in a Month of Lunches: value of GIT

[Paul Wallace]

Hi Rick

In order to convince people to use GIT in an enterprise software development shop, what are the advantages of GIT I can point to over other version control systems such as Subversion?

Paul

[Stephan van Hulst]

The main benefit of GIT is that you have local source control. You can create commits and revert back to them without having to be connected to a central repository. Useful if you're working away from the office, or if you're playing around with code you don't want to push to the server.

[Davit Chkhaidze]

For me main advantage is that Git is a distributed version control system, You can have your local copy of the source and work offline with whole history by grabbing it every time you do pull request. It makes working on big project very productive from any place.
Git had problems with branching/merging but nowadays it improved and in addition it's easy too do merge when you have entire history of changes.

Davit

[Paul Wallace]

Decentralized source control is typically not something enterprise shops consider important, they like centralized source control.

[Bear Bibeault]

For me, the ease of branching and merging when compared to other SC systems was the clincher.

[Bear Bibeault]

P.S. It's Git, not GIT. It's not an acronym.

[Rick Umali]

Hi Paul,

...what are the advantages of GIT I can point to over other version control systems such as Subversion?

I'm glad a few others chimed in. For this question, I generally refer people to this very old post on the main Git wiki:

https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSvnComparison

The two key aspects mentioned so far are ones I regularly offer: 1) distributed nature (i.e. local history/commits without the need for a server), and 2) fast branching.

There are ways for an enterprise to host a centralized Git hosting solution (GitHub's Enterprise product, GitLab), and this might offer a path towards using it. Some enterprises may not be aware that they can host Git entirely within their network, and this may be a good first step for a trial.

[Rob Dennett]

Bear Bibeault wrote:For me, the ease of branching and merging when compared to other SC systems was the clincher.

What's an example of this? Is the problem that on SVN, it's slow to check out a branch?

[Bear Bibeault]

Not only that, but a branch was a heavyweight alternate checkout. And as I recall, merging back in was a royal pain and was easy to do wrong. The result was that I avoided branching like the plague which made parallel development and experimentation awkward.

With Git, branches are easy to create and control, and I'll frequently have multiple branches going in my project at once.

(Checking my history and for one project I once had 17 simultaneous branches. I can't even begin to think of doing that with svn.)

[Bear Bibeault]

Amusing (at least to me) aside: while typing the above, autocorrect replaced a typo of "branches" with "banshees". Not inappropriate when I think of how I thought about branches in subversion days.

[Rob Dennett]

Does Git solve the problem of losing history when files are moved?

[Bear Bibeault]

Git retains the history of moved files.