Monday, August 4, 2008

Moving on from CVS to Git — Why, and why Git?

For The Great Trip to Canada I decided to convert my CVS repositories to Git. I've always kept repositories on my notebook because I work a lot when I'm on the way. Or when I'm sitting in a café, for that matter. Well, the actual reason is that until recently it was practically unaffordable to be online then. Yeah you lucky bastards living in countries with free WiFi access points everywhere are permitted to feel smug now. I like to commit often so I need to either be online permanently or to have “the” repositories on my machine. With Git (or any other distributed version control system) I don't need to be online permanently and I have repositories on my machine—note the absence of the word “the” here. I chose Git because of several reasons, the strongest one probably being a gut feeling. I watched Linus talk on git, I read tons of pages and posts about CVS, Subversion, Arch, BitKeeper, Mercurial, Bazaar and Git and pages that compared even more. Then I settled on Git. Maybe because I thought that if the kernel people use it (as a replacement for BitKeeper even) it can't be that bad. Maybe because it seemed to have the strongest momentum. Or maybe I just didn't want to be “wrong, stupid and butt-ugly" ;). So it has been decided. More on the technical stuff tomorrow.

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