7 Reasons to Migrate from SVN to Git now
- Latest versions of Eclipse and other IDEs have a Git interface built in while SVN plugins are a clumsy add-on. Even IBM and Microsoft, with their own SCM offerings, have Git baked into their IDE products.
- Git is a ‘distributed’ source control system and does not require a live connection by each user to the central repository. This allows users to commit, and create tags and branches offline and then decide whether to ‘push’ them to a central repository. Thus, it increases developer productivity and reduced central repository maintenance.
- Multiple teams are much easier to manage due to the distributed nature of Git. Changes made by your team or other partners/vendors can be coordinated using well-established ‘push’ workflows.
- Best-practice workflows have developed around open-source Git that are now quickly becoming the industry standard. For example, creating a branch for every issue is now a well-known workflow. Git does not copy the entire tree for a branch and thus it is easier to manage frequent branching and merging. The social coding site, Github, is re-inforcing these workflows.
- Cherry-picking, or selecting individual commits for push/pull/merge (syncing) comes in very handy, especially when dealing with demanding customer teams.
- Devops and code review tools, especially issue management and continuous build tools, are increasingly assuming Git to be the default source control mechanism.
- Finally, Git is not just the ‘next big thing’ – it may well be the most evolved stage of source control for the foreseeable future. There is little competition and the adoption rate and market saturation makes it an obvious choice.