Tag Archives: source control

Loving Git

I suppose this must be the zillionth post about how Git is so cool, but I’ll tell you what I love about it:

  1. Ultra fast commits. Coming from subversion, typing commit and getting a prompt back instantly is so surprising that you double check the first few times.
  2. Branching! God, you don’t realize how much you miss it until you have fast branching and merging. Without the pain of creating cps, just a simple git checkout -b branch_name and git merge branch_name and everything just works.
  3. The above was the reason I tried git in the first place. mobME’s an SVN shop and we do the usual trunk, tags, branches dance. When the trunk shapes up to be stable though I can’t seem to do anything on it. I can fork off a new branch in SVN but that’s too painful to even think about. What do I do now? git clone it, create a branch, and do regular git svn rebases and dcommits.
  4. Oh did I mention bidirectional SVN support? Without which I wouldn’t/couldn’t have switched no matter how much I wanted to try this cool new thing.

But it’s great and it really changes the way you think about VCS. Notice something? I didn’t even talk about distributed source control, and that’s coz even when I use git like I use SVN – committing to a central repo at the end and pulling changes from it, it’s brilliant. I’d definitely want to explore cool stuff like github soon for personal use (some gracious soul gave me an invite some time back).