a git plan, long term

[Scott Koranda]

Hello,

Apologies for barging in...

> Historically true, but only because we just haven't.  Chad and I
> discussed several times the desirability to using branches more
> effectively.    There's absolutely no technical reason, and no policy
> reason (other than what we decide) to preclude us branching like crazy.

Given the size of the code base I suspect you will find SVN branching
"like crazy"
to be cumbersome and resource intensive. The reason is that in SVN a branch
is mostly a copy.

Git, on the other hand, uses an elegant and inexpensive technique so
that branching
is fast. You will not give creating a new branch just to explore,
experiment, or make
a small bug fix a second thought because it is so easy and fast.

> I admittedly don't understand branching in Git (or anything else in Git
> for that matter), but at least wrt to frequency of branching I don't see
> any particular advantage with Git.

Branching in git is so fast I do create a new branch for each work unit,
be it a bug fix or just a small feature enhancement.

I cannot do that with a SVN repository of any reasonable size.

>
> As a general statement: At this point I have close to zero
> knowledge/experience with Git, so that obviously colors my opinion.
> Mainly, I'm still trying to understand what the "get" with Git would be,
> other than it being the cool, shiny new toy that all the kids are
> using.  The offline capabilities seem not useful to me personally.  The
> local branching is interesting, but only an advantage over svn if you
> really don't want others to see your branching activity in the central
> repo.

In addition to being much more efficient, the way branching and commits are
handled in git allows one to be much more flexible about when, what, and how to
commit and when necessary allows for the commit history to be "massaged".

> The main thing that puzzles me is:  Git may be better if you're
> really using it as a *distributed* SCM - but most people seem to wind up
> just using it with GitHub or other centralized repo.  I'm sure there's
> more to it than that, but I welcome enlightenment.
>

I used to think git was just a bright and shiny object until I
invested a week learning
it with a real code project. Now I will not choose another version
control system
if I have any choice because it has increased my productivity.

HTH.

Sincerely,

Scott Koranda

P.S. One of my favorite git features is 'stash'--with one command I
can take all the current uncommitted edits and have them stashed away
safely while I go back to master, branch quickly, make a bug fix,
commit it, push, then "unstash" and pick right up where I left off.
See

http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Tools-Stashing