Re: git for subversion users

From: Steven Grimm <koreth@midwinter.com>
Date: Jun 26, 2007, 05:25 UTC
Message-ID: <4680A341.5000208@midwinter.com>
In-Reply-To: <46809733.2060200@vilain.net>

Sam Vilain wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> If svn is still the master there should be no difference to the way you
> normally collaborate development using Subversion.  The central server
> is still the publishing point for trunk, however many release
> engineering branches you use, and feature branches.  It's only if you
> want to start mixing groups of people, some working with subversion, and
> other people using git-svn and merging between each other at the git
> level, that you can start getting confused.  They can safely operate at
> the patch trading level though.
>

I can vouch for all of that as well. On some of my repositories I use git solely as a fancy Subversion client, no interaction with any other git repositories. And hardly anyone at my company even knows about it; as far as they are concerned I just check stuff into the svn repository like any other engineer.

But on a few of my repositories I do things like use git to keep a copy of my work in progress synced up between my laptop and my development server, or (rarely) share my work with another git-aware developer. In those cases I do have to be kind of careful what I do, mostly around making sure all the repositories are in agreement about which branches come from where and about when I use rebase vs. merge vs. squash merge.

I will say, though, that the upcoming addition to git-svn to allow merges to be directly committed to the svn repository will make some of those kinds of scenarios a lot less brittle than they are now. It's still a work in progress but it looks very promising so far. (Search the list for "[PATCH] git-svn: allow dcommit to retain local merge information" if you want to see what I'm talking about.)

-Steve