On Tuesday 12 January 2010 21:52:24 Sean Phelan wrote:
> Chris,
> 
> Although I'm fluent in SVN, I know nothing about GIT, and it sounds like
> any real technical debate on the 2 tools won't work unless someone can
> lay them both out with a glossary.

And I have the reverse problem.  However, thankfully there are plenty of 
people who have experience with both, so it is possible to find what you're 
looking for.  This first page has a list of actions and the comamnds you would 
use for either Git or Svn, which looks like it fits what you need:

   http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html

This page has a list of features Git and SVN have over each other:

   http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSvnComparsion

This author seems to have switched from SVN to Git and seems to be making a 
case for Git, but along the way he shows both sets of commands and I'm 
including it only because it's the first time I've seen the 'git stash' 
command used:

   http://markmcb.com/2008/10/18/3-reasons-to-switch-to-git-from-subversion/

> > You can think of a "superproject" as yet another Git repository that
> > contains other Git repositories
> 
> This is exactly what I often do with SVN - I have some projects with
> nothing in them but a collection of externals definitions.

Well yes, but I think SVN's externals are a bit more flexible in how they can 
be used than Git's superproject submodules.  Git's 'superproject' sounds like 
it is ONLY meant to be used as a layer on top, whereas SVN externals CAN be 
used that way but don't have to be.  [And this belief is based solely on the 
understanding I have from reading about these features.]

> As for terms ... with git, you mentioned "clone", "wrapper", and "pull".
> 
> With SVN, I'd be talking about "external", checkout, commit, status, and
> update.
> 
> That's why I think we have a bit of a language barrier comparing the
> two. And I KNOW there is a concepts barrier, since GIT is definitely not
> just the next subversion.

Sure.  Vocabulary takes time to understand -- for a new field I'm not familiar 
with it usually takes me about six months before I can fluently talk to 
someone whose been in that field for a while.  Re-learning is usually shorter, 
but un-learning can be difficult.

> Some groups are bridging the 2 together ... SVN for the master
> repositories, and GIT for the working ones.  Apparently, there are some
> tools that do local conversions from git to svn and back.

Yes I'm aware of some tools like git-cvs and git-svn that can do that, but as 
Sean mentioned during his talk there are some issues with their use, in that 
behind the scenes Git is silently doing a 'rebase' in order to write linear 
history when making an SVN or CVS commit, which taints the local Git 
repository in a way such that it should not be shared with others from that 
point.  [I'd like to think that a git-svn commit could be done from a local 
Git branch so that the master branch doesn't get tainted that way, but perhaps 
that's optimistic.]

SVN for the master and Git underneath sounds interesting, because the Git 
superproject methodology sounds like it creates a few workflow issues.

> At some point, I'd like to see a case study of someone who switched from
> SVN to GIT and how it was better ... or worse.

I suspect you'll be able to find both kinds of situations.

> I could have written that case study from CVS to SVN based on personal
> experience.  I'm sure there are some other sites with good writeups of
> svn-vs-git.  Not just features, but actual benefits.

As you can see, there are.

-- 

  -- Chris

--

Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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