[wp-hackers] Switching from SVN

[Ryan McCue]

Brian Layman wrote:
>
> I favorited a tweet on this last month.  It seems appropriate..
> "@sdenike based on dev friends ditching SVN for Git it's mature
> enough. Also, use the CLI you lazy jerkface. You don't need a 3rd
> party app." - http://twitter.com/#!/joeonhosting/status/29664317932

I agree. For Subversion, I've *always* used TortoiseSVN, for two reasons:

   1. The Subversion CLI has always seemed like a bit of a black box to
      me. Not sure why, maybe I just didn't take the time to learn it
      properly.
   2. The way I like to work is: work on a bunch of files, then, commit
      the individual bits out of that, by picking and choosing files.
      The TortoiseSVN UI lets me do that, and I haven't found how to do
      that with the CLI (see #1)

For the former, this is likely my fault. I've read the SVN book and a
bunch of other material a lot, but never felt like I had a full
understanding of it. On the other hand, the short tutorials for Git got
me up to speed in no time, and although there are some bits I'm a little
fuzzy on (fast-forwarding merges, for one), this is purely because I
don't need to know about them.

Regarding the latter, I feel that this is one place Git shines, and is
probably my single favourite feature. Because of the way Git is
structured (with the staging area), you can add in "patch" mode, where
Git takes a diff, splits it up into the individual parts, and asks if
you'd like to stage each one. I love this, because I can say "oh, that
bit was just a doc fix, I'll leave that for now" and commit it later.

If I had to go back to SVN, but I could take one feature with me, it
would be that. I've also not seen any of the Git GUIs do this (though, I
haven't used them much).

-- 
Ryan McCue
<http://ryanmccue.info/>