[ale] Upgrading from svn 1.6.18 to 1.7.x on Fedora

[Doug Hall]

+1 for git.

I used to use SVN, and it's okay. But my entire development process
has changed for the better, thanks to git. Creating branches on git is
very easy. Let's say I'm working on feature 'X' in the 'X' branch.
Suddenly we've discovered a problem on the production server. I can
easily switch to the master branch, make sure it's up-to-date, then
quickly set up a new fix branch to work on the fix. Once tested and
committed, I can switch back to the master branch. Make sure it's
up-to-date once again. Merge in my fix branch. Push the new master
branch. Delete my local fix branch. Then, go back to my 'X' branch.
This whole process is much better than SVN's because SVN was never
good at (easily) creating branches.

Here's another cool (and very VERY) useful feature that's built into
git. Instead of the repository being file-based, it's change based.
And those "changes" are saved in object files, named by the SHA1 the
change creates. If someone wanted to corrupt your repository, there's
no easy way they could. The SHA is verified at every juncture, and git
would reject the corruption at the object level. The corruption would
show up immediately, and you could not easily incorporate it into a
new commit. Try that, any other CVS on the planet! +1 Linus!

Git is a little harder to wrap your head around, and it's not as easy
if you have "clients" messing with your repository. However, your
clients could have SVN, and you could use the git-svn utility to push
changes to their svn repository.

I'm using git, not because of any "problems" I had with SVN. At least
I didn't realize I had those problems before I started using git. But
git allows me to work in a way I couldn't with SVN. Oh, and it's
supremely efficient. Allow me to paste this from linuxMIPS:

As of linux-2.6.21 the size is 308MB for the full repository. Users of
git 1.5.0 and newer can use a git feature named shallow tree to prune
the history. This can reduce the repository to as little as 112MB.

I don't know exactly how many commits that represents over the years,
from probably hundreds of developers, but I'm guessing a LOT!

Doug Hall