Tech Blog

We switched to Git this morning. Before making this switch Gert-Jan (CTO of Floorplanner) asked me: “what is the advantage of Git over Subversion?”. I answered him and thought I’ll make a post of the answer as it can be useful for other bosses like Gert-Jan.

Since we started using Subversion, which was a couple of years ago, using a code versioning tool helped us a lot. We could work on Floorplanner with the whole team together without storing the “repository” on our remote FTP location (early days) or emailing changes up and forth (ancient times ). But when working with Subversion for some time, little things started to bother, i’ll sum them up:

1. We needed tutorials for creating a branch in SVN every time again
2. When merging the branch back, SVN didn’t know where that branch started.
3. When merging the branch back, each change was recorded back as the user who did the merge.

The consequences of these disadvantages.

We avoided creating branches.

Why is not creating branches bad practice?

I’ll give you an example. Sometimes when we were working on some big feature, we didn’t create a branch (it was a lot of work), we just committed it into the trunk when it was “kinda” ready. Then a sudden exception in the software that was online occurred, we now had a problem! That bug had to be fixed NOW, but the changes we just committed into the trunk were not fully tested and couldn’t go online. You understand this was a tedious process and resulted in more downtime sometimes.

But why is Git better?

1. Creating branches in Git is a lot easier than doing this in SVN.
2. Git keeps track where branches come from. So when creating a branch, merging back is very simple.
3. It keeps commit messages intact, when merging.

Conclusion

The whole point, remember this post is called “Git vs SVN for bosses”, branching is a joy in Git and this results in better being able to have access to different versions of the same software at the same time, which again results in being able to fix that bug NOW.

Other resources

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

I personally am a fan of the git version control system. The best part of git is its speed, and the simplicity of using local branches.

Local branches are very helpful if you are working on different features at the same time but want to keep them apart. An example: it happens all the time that I am working on some feature and than I have to put my current work aside to work on a high priority issue. Once this issue is solved, I need to commit the changes and usually do a deploy of the web application so that the problem is solved as soon as possible. With Subversion, I sometimes commit files that were part of the unfinished feature I was working on before I started on the high priority issue. If I am not careful and deploy those files, unfinished work will be put into production and this can go horribly wrong, like every page request returning a 500-error of our high traffic site .

Using git, I can put my current work aside easily by using git stash. When I am finished with the high priority issue, I can revert to my previous work with git stash apply.

Another option: branching the project (using git branch feature) if the feature I am working on is invasive and than switch branches for high priority issues using git checkout master. I can go back to the feature branch with git checkout feature, followed by git merge master to merge back the changes I just made in the master branch. Branching and merging is very fast in git and merging is not the PITA like it is in Subversion.

However, our main code repository will probably remain in SVN for now. Luckily for me, I can use git-svn locally to profit from these advantages. I found an informative page on installing and getting started with git-svn on OSX. If you know Subversion, this page is helpful to translate Subversion commandos to their git alternatives.