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Comment by jakebasile

4 months ago

Yeah I definitely hated Subversion, which helped push me to try Git back in the day. Actually, back then I was an `hg` guy. That battle was lost long ago though.

I think you linked to the same post as OP, though?

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jakebasile

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stavros  4 months ago

I wrote the post, so that's a post from the perspective of someone who doesn't hate git :P

I used bzr after SVN, but my larger point is that it's all fine, the question was whether you want to go through some short-term learning for long-term gain, or if you want to keep using what you know. Either is fine, I'm still using vim as my editor, for example.

  • tharkun__  4 months ago

    SVN was not fine. Branching took forever (all the copying). And the space that required ... In fact, lots of things took forever on large-ish repos. Remember that everything required the server and network and disk speeds were slower back then. And just a commit could destroy your work if you got stuck in a conflict resolution. So you'd have to copy all the files you changed to a backup just in case, then delete them if the resolution went OK etc.

    Was it better than CVS in some way? Sure.

    But git is just better in so many ways. Back in the day I used git exclusively with git-svn at a place that was still stuck with SVN and I had a blast, while everyone else didn't. I just never had any of the problems they did.

    I'm not entirely sure what pain people speak of with git. I found the transition very natural. And don't come talking to me about the "weird command syntax". Some of that was specifically to be compatible / "intuitive" / what they were used to for people coming from tools like SVN.

    Sure you gotta learn about "the index", understand that everything is local and that you have an origin and local copy of all the labels (also sometimes called branches or tags) you can attach to commits. That's about it for the normal and regular use that someone would've had with SVN.

    • stavros  4 months ago

      Well you can either have a viewpoint of "the current thing I use is fine because I'm used to the warts" or "it's not fine because other things exist".

      It can't be that SVN is bad and git is better but also that git is fine even though jj is better.

      4 replies →

ljm  4 months ago

I wonder if there's a parallel universe where people are writing posts about Sapling and getting mercurial users to migrate to it.

  • sfink  4 months ago

    Before jj came along (or rather, before it reached my threshold of awareness), I was such a person. Started with git, switched to mercurial, wanted to work against github so tried sapling, loved it and started telling people about it.

    I probably would have stuck with Sapling, but my company switched to git and the jj integration was cleaner -- especially being able to run in colocated mode: your project root directory has both .jj/ and .git/ subdirectories, and you can use both jj and git commands without much trouble. If someone gives me a git commit hash, I can just use it directly with jj.

    Sapling is good. I'm still fond of it, and in fact still have a few repositories I haven't switched over yet. But being able to do everything with a single tool is useful, plus jj gives me some extra capabilities over sapling (or at least things that I don't know how to do as easily).