Skip to main content

Geek and Poke versus Subversion

I noticed that Geek and Poke has done a fair share of SVN-bashing over the last months. These are awesome, hilarious, and ring so true to my experience with SVN.  I've collected them here and written a few thoughts on how it's different with a distributed alternative like Git.

1. Being a Coder Made Easy
Typical syndrome of first-man-to-the-mill syndrome. The typical use-case is to commit a big fat refactoring early in the morning, before anyone has a chance to get in your way.

With Git, these situations do not occur so often. Big commits are made in branches where they do not disturb the workflow of others. Branches do have to get merged back at some point, and conflicts dealt with, but this happens in a planned and orderly fashion. There is no race to merge branch first.

2. Simply Explained - SVN Guinea Pig
Oh, so typical. Do not update the code when it's broken centrally. This problem is magnified in the lack of a continuous integration system or a fast build.

With Git, your active work is on a branch where you can pull in needed changes as you need them. You can also set up staging branches that run tests or code-review on incoming code, before they are merged into the main line, like they do with Gerrit.

3. Good Coders
Nuff said. Same point as in the previous one.

4. Real Coders Help Eachother
Ditto. Well, it's worth rubbing in :)


5. One Day In The Life Of A Coder - Part 2
After you do a Subversion update, you're stuck with the latest revision, which is bad in the case of a broken build you're not going to fix. You could of course update to an earlier revision, but this typically takes so long, that you're better off getting a coffee and having a chat before you try doing another update to see if the build has been fixed.

With Git, you can immediately reset to the code you had before merging in the latest changes. This takes a matter of seconds, even in a huge repository.


6. One Day In The Life Of A Coder - Part 3
Again, so typical. You want to commit, or you have to commit, but you can't find a good description for it on the fly. You either write a worthless commit message, or fiddle around for ten minutes finding out what you are actually committing.

With Git, you don't let these moments break your flow. You commit, use "Yada yada" as the commit message, then return later with rebase --interactive to squash, and rewrite your commits.

Bottom line
Dear SVN-users. It should be a wake-up call that there are actually comics making fun of one of the most fundamental and important tool in your infrastructure. Start making some changes.

Comments

  1. This is also so true with Microsoft TFS (a.k.a "at least it's not as bad as Visual-SourceSafe" ), which as a centralized version control system, suffers from the same ills as Subversion, and then some more.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Johan, thanks for your comment. Good to know that we're not missing out on anything in TFS :)

    Maybe you should try out Git-TFS? https://github.com/spraints/git-tfs

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o

Leaving eyeo

Thirteen blog posts later, this one notes my departure from eyeo after 4 years and 3 months. I joined eyeo around the headcount of 80 employees, and now I think there's just over 250 people there. My role coming in was as operations manager, doing a mix of infrastructure engineering and technical project management. I later on took on organizational development to help the company deal with its growing pains . We introduced cross-functional teams, departments (kind of like guilds), new leadership structures, goal-setting frameworks, onboarding processes and career frameworks.  And all of this in a rapidly growing distributed company. I'm proud and happy that for a long time I knew every employee by name and got to meet every single new-hire through training them on company structure and processes.  At some point, we had enough experienced leaders and organizational developers that I could zoom back in on working in one team, consulting them on  Git and continuous integration