[vlc-devel] Git vs Subversion

Pierre d'Herbemont pdherbemont at free.fr
Wed Feb 27 16:40:36 CET 2008


On Feb 27, 2008, at 3:26 PM, jboileau wrote:

> Hi,
>
> If someone as a minute (ok that rules out any answer to this :-) ),  
> I am curious of why the move from Subversion to Git for the VLC  
> project. I don't know Git but we are using Subversion on some of our  
> projects here. When I saw you guys moving from Subversion to Git my  
> first reaction was: what do they know that I don't.

Hi Jacques!

I think that the main point of git is to allow multiple working trees.

For instance we were using git for the Google Summer of Code so that  
non committer student could work on their tree as if they were working  
on trunk. Because mainly git allows to have a working tree and can  
nicely merge back commit from upstreams.

See vlc-ecp-project.git which is keeping in sync with vlc.git:
http://git2.videolan.org/

Also for non committers it allows to send multiple patches that are  
atomic according to the commit the non-committer has in its tree.

For committer, it eases the use of feature branch, that can be synced  
nicely with the trunk, and merged back as nicely when the feature  
becomes stable.

Well, in summary the tool is much more powerful than SVN, and not that  
much complex if you use basic (read SVN) features.

This has been discussed a lot on the internet, and there are many  
articles available.

This one is nice:
http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSvnComparsion

Pierre.




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