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Re: svn vs. git

From: Andreas Krey <a.krey_at_gmx.de>
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2017 08:48:07 +0200

On Thu, 20 Jul 2017 17:38:38 +0000, Nathan Hartman wrote:
...
> One myth that is not mentioned on that page is the famous, "But you can't
> work offline!" Being able to work "offline" is supposed to be the biggest
> selling point of a DVCS over a CVCS. Okay... I'm calling that a myth. First
> of all, there is nothing inherent to Subversion that "prevents" you from
> working offline. You can work, you just can't do server side operations.

In other words, you have a versioning system that you can't use offline,
except for local diffs.

> Is that such a big deal?

The big deal is a slightly different point. Making commit 'offline'
not only allows me to make commits while in the middle of nowhere
(and here in germany this easily includes trains).

It also allows me to make commits for a repo that I don't have
commit privileges for - I can commit my work in a meaningful way,
and later convince one of the official committers to pull these.

This also means that I can't maintain a patched version of
svn (or anything in an svn repo) without having commit
privilege to the source repo, or having to do the
vendor branch dance (with in itself is unnecessarily
annoying in svn).

> And if it is, do you mean to tell me that in this day
> and age of cloud services and IoT, where every single thing you do requires
> Internet access, that you're ever really "offline" for long enough that it
> matters?

It also makes a difference in speed - git log usually outputs data
faster than anybody can open an SSL connection in edge land.

...

> And even if you are planning to spend a year alone on a deserted
> island, nothing stops you from doing "svnadmin create" on your local
> computer and making as many commits as you want.

You know that that is a straw man. There is no in-svn way to
reconcile that with another repo, and also I don't want to
start on an empty repo, but, say, on the current svn trunk.

> But that doesn't make
> sense, because the longer you work in isolation, the less likely it is that
> your work will merge cleanly when you get back.

That is also orthogonal. Being offline does not mean that other people
work in the same repo, let alone area of a product. Also, the alternative,
namely working on trunk and do frequent updates, is worse in comparison,
because then you end up in conflicts in you sandbox, and have no way
of backing out and trying again later.

> Even the smartest and
> greatest DVCS in the world can't solve that problem.

Neither can non-distributed systems. The question is how long
you let work diverge, not where you do it.

> Subversion is a very good system. It doesn't get the credit it deserves,

Please. git managed to be faster in providing actually working
(i.e. tracked) merges than subversion, and then there was
the --reintegrate debacle that took another five years to
sort out.

Andreas

-- 
"Totally trivial. Famous last words."
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@*.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:29:21 -0800
Received on 2017-07-25 08:48:36 CEST

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