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Re:A Git user’s first (and hopefully last) foray into SVN-land by to3m on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @08:51AM (#2941186)
SVN is better than git for ANY binary files, really, because with no centralized repository it's rather hard for git to implement any kind of locking. Locking is pretty much essential for binary files, since most are not mergeable in any meaningful way. It's literally NO USE AT ALL to be forced to make somebody redo their recent work when there's a conflict :)

SVN's locking ain't so amazing, it must be said, because it's clearly not the way it's intended to work. But it's better than nothing, certainly, and TortoiseSVN on Windows has some nice features that make it work fairly well.

Another issue is the filling of your hard drive with crap - obviously git keeps the entire repository locally, and SVN keeps a previous revision (I think?), which is a bit useless for enormous hundreds-of-gigabytes repositories mostly filled with stuff that's not significantly further compressible. To add insult to injury, git then spits in your face by not letting you retrieve only part of the repository! - well, obviously the problem is that git just isn't designed for this kind of thing, not that its decisions are unreasonable. Shame, though... some kind of binaries-and-locking support would be nice. It would be great to be able to use git for everything.

Re:A Git user’s first (and hopefully last) foray into SVN-land by arethuza on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @09:45AM (#2941392)
I managed to persuade a multinational team of accountants to use SVN to manage their Excel spreadsheets - has worked remarkably well.
Re:A Git user’s first (and hopefully last) foray into SVN-land by wladimir on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @09:25AM (#2941299)
I'm pretty sure that git does allow working with only part of the repository. You need to provide some specific options when cloning...
Re:A Git user’s first (and hopefully last) foray into SVN-land by aidenn0 on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @02:40PM (#2942662)
You're wrong.

You can create a git repository that has other git repositories in it (submodules) but you can't checkout an arbitrary subtree of a git repository. I spent a long amount of time searching for this, so I know.

Now, people have written scripts that will convert a directory to a git submodule by moving history around and stuff like that, but you need to check out the whole repository first.

Re:A Git user’s first (and hopefully last) foray into SVN-land by wladimir on Friday September 02, 2011 @09:41AM (#2954042)
Sorry, I meant "part of the repository" as "part of the timeline", not "part of the directory structure". You don't need to fetch the entire history.