

Ask HN: Should we ditch Git for SVN? - Killah911

I've worked with SVN before.  I love the simplicity.  Then there are things like TortoiseSVN which makes SVN's usability much better.<p>I've got a small team and we were looking to move into GIT.  However, it seems like there's a pretty steep learning curve and the more I look at it the more I'm thinking SVN w/ TortoiseSVN is the way to go.<p>I have 3 interns, one of whom accidentally deleted all his work afew days ago and I'd like to introduce them to version control.  I asked them to go learn about GIT and 4 days later, they're confused as heck.<p>What's been your experience with Git v SVN?  The user interface thing is a serious issue to me.  It looks like merging is a giant pain in the ass compared to svn.  Before I course correct and move to svn, wanted to get some feedback from the HN community.
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Maascamp
If you want the benefits of distributed version control with a very simple
user interface I'd highly recommend giving Mercurial a try.

A great introduction to Mercurial for people familiar with SVN can be found
here <http://hginit.com/>. Mercurial also has Tortoise HG
(<http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/>) if you want a GUI interface.

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antidoh
SVN to Git is going backwards. At least go to another distributed vc.

If your interns got confused on their own, they could use some direction. As
interns.

I still get tense when I think about SVN merging.

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antidoh
I meant Git to SVN is backwards.

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bee
there's also <http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/> similar with TortoiseSVN.

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Killah911
Thanks, that's a big help. Is there any way to foolproof in git? In SVN unless
you get rid of the repository on the server directly (which most users don't
have access to), everything is saved so work isn't lost (as long as you check
in). According to point number 7 on:
[http://steveko.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-
abo...](http://steveko.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/) a
user can potentially blow everything away with no clear way to recover, is
this something to be concerned about or can failsafes be easily built in so
this doesn't happen?

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kls
You can set up a script that will auto push to a remote repo on commit, the
confusion comes in with the terminology in most distributed systems commit
just means tell my local source control to track the change, where as in the
centralized model commit generally means move these changes to the server.
Just remind them that nothing gets to the server without a push. distributed
systems have serious advantages over the centralized model, specifically when
it comes to getting everybody's changes merged together in a chronological
order. That advantage far outweighs the learning curve. If you use Mac's I
would recommend SourceTree it is a very good UI for GIT and HG.

