DVCS vs. Subversion brittleness (was Re: Moving to D)

[Michel Fortin]

On 2011-01-28 11:29:49 -0500, Bruno Medeiros 
<brunodomedeiros+spam at com.gmail> said:

> I've also been mulling over whether to try out and switch away from 
> Subversion to a DVCS, but never went ahead cause I've also been 
> undecided about Git vs. Mercurial. So this whole discussion here in the 
> NG has been helpful, even though I rarely use branches, if at all.
> 
> However, there is an important issue for me that has not been mentioned 
> ever, I wonder if other people also find it relevant. It annoys me a 
> lot in Subversion, and basically it's the aspect where if you delete, 
> rename, or copy a folder under version control in a SVN working copy, 
> without using the SVN commands, there is a high likelihood your working 
> copy will break! It's so annoying, especially since sometimes no amount 
> of svn revert, cleanup, unlock, override and update, etc. will fix it. 
> I just had one recently where I had to delete and re-checkout the whole 
> project because it was that broken.
> Other situations also seem to cause this, even when using SVN tooling 
> (like partially updating from a commit that delete or moves 
> directories, or something like that) It's just so brittle.
> I think it may be a consequence of the design aspect of SVN where each 
> subfolder of a working copy is a working copy as well (and each 
> subfolder of repository is a repository as well)
> 
> Anyways, I hope Mercurial and Git are better at this, I'm definitely 
> going to try them out with regards to this.

Git doesn't care how you move your files around. It track files by 
their content. If you rename a file and most of the content stays the 
same, git will see it as a rename. If most of the file has changed, 
it'll see it as a new file (with the old one deleted). There is 'git 
mv', but it's basically just a shortcut for moving the file, doing 'git 
rm' on the old path and 'git add' on the new path.

I don't know about Mercurial.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/