Switched from Subversion to Git

http://concise-software.blogspot.com/2009/08/git-scales-enough-for-enterprise-java.html

by stuff4ben • 17 years ago

40 43 17 years ago

concise-software.blogspot.com

gruseom2• 17 years ago

An amusing combination of titles:

In Search of Concise Software

Git Breezily Handles our 500,000-line Enterprise Java Project

henning• 17 years ago

I wonder what that 500,000 lines buys them.

frossie• 17 years ago

I am also not sure why it matters - we switched 3,000,000+ lines of code from subversion to git, but the effort was not really correlated with LOC. The major overhead of switching from subversion to git is the learning hit on the developers (though it is certainly worth it for many of the reasons described in the OP).

jrockway6• 17 years ago

200,000 getters and setters.

JulianMorrison• 17 years ago

In a comparably sized codebase at my job, there's connectors to this and that idiosyncratic/complex external system (some of which require for example extinct dialects of SOAP), there's legacy cruft, there's systems that draw together multiple providers and present a unified interface, or that distribute commands to the proper subsystem, and there's a ton of reports and front ends and back ends for multiple years of customers, which get remixed and reused.

axod5• 17 years ago

500,000 lines may be extremely concise for what it does :/

barrkel• 17 years ago

500,000 lines isn't a lot of code. The compiler I work on has almost that many lines, but the larger product (IDE) has many millions.

plinkplonk• 17 years ago

"500,000 lines isn't a lot of code."

in Java. Not to spawn any language wars, but imagine 500,000 "lines" in something like J, FORTH or even Factor.

wvenable• 17 years ago

I wish git was bit more user-friendly on Windows. With TortioseSVN, using subversion is so smooth and easy I almost forget it's there. I've got a bunch of Git tools installed in Windows, but it's all so horrible. The GUI tools are significantly worse than using Git bash at the command line.

I think, for Git, the GUI I'm looking for probably isn't possible. It's designed with the philosophy of small command line tools combined together -- that's not something you can paint over with pretty UI.

ghshephard• 17 years ago

Have you tried TortoiseGit? http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/

davidw• 17 years ago

How is that shaping up? Ready for production use? For people who don't know too much about version control?

chrischen• 17 years ago

There's an eclipse plugin, if you use eclipse. But yea the user-friendliness of Git needs work. If you setup some web manag frontend for git it might make some parts of it easier. Using trac+git or redmine+git would allow you to at least visualize the repository.

litewulf3• 17 years ago

(This is why I use mercurial.)

jrockway6• 17 years ago

I don't consider SVN user-friendly. It might use pretty fonts in the UI, but one wrong move, and your data is lost forever. ("svn update" is especially bad about this.)

With git, any operation I perform can be reverted via the reflog. Even reverts can be reverted! That beats any shiny UI any day.

sokoloff2• 17 years ago

Any more details on svn update being especially bad at killing your data forever? We've been using svn for 5.5 years now and I've never personally lost data with any of the available clients. (I can admit that svn revert does irretrievably destroy client-side changes, but that's what the command is designed to do, so...)

etherael3• 17 years ago

Does anyone have a real world example of a busy dev shop with a bunch of stretched coders that are accustomed to tortoise svn only based source control switching to git? the coders at this place range from brilliant to pretty good, but I don't think some of them would be capable of wrapping their heads around msysgit and they're thoroughly wedded to windows.

Tortoisegit viable? Looked ok from my brief experimentations, but I know that's different to actually doing real work with it...

litewulf3• 17 years ago

Why do you want to switch to git? I say this as someone who uses perforce, subversion, git and mercurial on a regular basis. Version control is largely similar for the 90% of your work life, and that 10% can usually be solved by hand.

etherael3• 17 years ago

quite a few reasons, none of which aren't covered in tha parent post except for one, which is that subversion on test environments is a real pain to get working on various environments. As the dev team uses tortoise and always gets "there is a new version available, please update here" I have seen the unenviable position of having repos on staging environments rendered un-updatable except by tarball because subversion on the remote end refusees to work with the newly incompatible repository post a single commit from tortoise SVN 1.6.3 for example.

This is not a problem with git, and the being able to push updates directly to the staging environment can also be non -trivially handy too.

That said, that's a minor annoyance vs the full blown excellent points that the original article makes about the advantages of git over subversion, so I'm a bit puzzled as to why this question is being asked, did you not think that the things covered in the article were worth anything?

tezza2• 17 years ago

Why do you want to switch to git? Agreed, I don't know either.

Any sort of branch/merge problems I encounter are mostly coders working on mutually incompatible versions of the base system. Not on a file level but rather on a protocol/format level

No mere source control system will be a hurdle of the same size as the hurdle of co-ordinating all the developers who broke each others preconditions.

---

So a switch to git will be best for projects with extremely stable interfaces where the branch/merge mechanism is the most time consuming part. Think: linux kernel, stable protocol services.

But where developers have to collaborate while modifying a shared framework git makes little difference. Think: early stage GUI frontends, or server components which inter-depend on message formats which are evolving.

smithjchris2• 17 years ago

Most "industry" developers can barely use Subversion. How are they supposed to handle Git?

nudded• 17 years ago

by reading this book : http://progit.org/book/

jrschulz• 17 years ago

If only those developers read books...

tjogin3• 17 years ago

That seems to presume Svn is easier to use than Git, in my opinion it is the other way around.

Switched from Subversion to Git

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