Motivation for Converting from Subversion to Git

We’re in the process of converting to Git at work. We’ve been talking about doing this for quite awhile, but never really had a compelling reason to do so. Recently though, something happened that has given us that reason.

Many of our projects are done with teams in both Hyderabad and India. We refer to these as “hybrid” projects. In a recent hybrid project, the SVN repository contained a lot of large assets (movies, images, PSDs, etc). Unfortunately, the internet bandwidth in our India office has been pretty bad. This caused updates to/from the svn server to take a very long time. This by itself caused delays, due to the time it took to sync up at the beginning and end of each location’s workday.

But then we threw a real monkey wrench into the works by converting the project to “Branch Based Development”. BBD has become a best practice where I work. We use this term to mean that a branch is created for each and every development task, then the branch is merged back into trunk only after it has been completed, tested, and code reviewed. However, branching/merging in Subversion requires essentially downloading then uploading the entire branch/trunk. I’m probably oversimplifying this, but the result was that each task ended up incurring that long update delay. Often multiple tasks can be completed in a single day, so now instead of a single delay at the beginning or end of the day, we ended up having this delay multiple times per day. At its worst, we were looking a 1-2 hours of delay per task!

At that point, someone pointed out that had we been using Git, this would not have been a problem. Git is much smarter about its branching, and doesn’t require this full upload/download to the remote. Granted, better organization of our svn repositories could have alleviated much of this problem, but we recognized that for international development, a DVCS like Git would be valuable and improve productivity.

So we’re using Git now. My experience with Git has been pretty much limited to clicking on the “Clone in Mac” button on Github. So I needed to learn Git.

Luckily, lynda.com has a very nice Git Essential Training course by Kevin Skoglund. I just completed that course this morning, and I’m excited now to get started using Git.  I recommend that you checkout the lynda.com course if you are just getting started with Git also.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *