Subject: Re: git for subversion users

From: Steven Grimm <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:25:21 -0700

Sam Vilain wrote:
> 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