Everybody keeps telling you that Git is better than Subversion. You keep hearing Git has better workflows, offline capabilities and is faster. But should we really jump on every new technology that is coming around the corner? Your source code is the heart of your software developement and you want to store it with a tool that is working. Here are 6 reasons why you shouldn’t use Git at work.
1 – Git destroys the idea of Continuous Integration
Git encourages you to use branches for your development. But when you work for 1 or 2 days on your branch, you’re not continuously integrate your code changes with those from your co-workers. You don’t know if someone changed something important in between that collide with your changes. And if you want to have your build server automatically build your development branch you need to copy the project for each new feature branch.
2 – Developers can be offended
SVN has this great feature that if you merge a branch to the trunk you lose all commits of the branch. This is great because the developer that has merged the changes is the one that is responsible for the changes. The dev manager can not blame you for a bug. Git keeps all the commit information from a branch when merging to another branch. You can blame the programmer directly. There is no technical protection for developers anymore.
3 – Git destroys the team experience
With SVN merging a change into the trunk is a real team experience. When you see conflicts you have to talk to the two developers that have changed the same code and find a solution. Because of the fact that merging with Git is different you end up with less conflicts and less possibilities to discuss the code changes directly with co-workers.
4 – Developers have too many options
With Subversion you have a simple workflow for adding your code to the repository:
1. You merge your local changes with the trunk on your machine.
2. You commit the changes.
I will not mention the second workflow (branching) because there are lot’s of discussions not to use branches in SVN. We have one simple workflow that everybody understands!
Git gives you the opportunity of lot’s of different workflows you can adapt and even combine: Having a Gatekeeper for your main branch, do cherry picking or let everybody pull and push to everybody’s development branch. What a mess!
5 – Git makes people work overtime
Subversion requires a server to search the history, create a branch or commit code changes. Git stores the wholes repository on your hard disk (what a waste of disk space). This makes it possible to work without network connection with the same possibilities as if you are in the office and connected to your SVN-server. It’s the perfect argument for your team lead to ask you to work over the weekend from home to hit the deadline of the current project. Don’t use Git and let this happen!
6 – Git is unsocial
Subversion gives you time to socialize when creating a branch, checkout a branch or even switch beween branches. You get some time to chat with co-workers, go to the kitchen and grap a cup of coffee or to write comments on facebook. Git changes the game for the worse: Due to the fact that you working just on your hard disk to do all this tasks in Git, it is faster and you lose the natural social time. It’s good for your dev-manger but bad for knowing what’s going on.
It is pretty clear that we shouldn’t use Git at work. Why should we change at all? SVN is a mature technology that has been around for more than a decade. There is no reason to change to a just 8 year old repository technology. Let’s face it: It’s great for open source but in a corporate environment offline possibilities and advanced workflows are not so important. We have been working for ages with centralized version control system. Think about the knowledge that is in the SVN community. Some people will be out of jobs if all companies switch to Git.
Don’t let that happen. Don’t use Git!
UPDATE : Did you git it?
Due to the confusion people have whether this article is meant to be funny or sirous: I love Git and I think it helps teams to do a better job. It solves a lot of problems that we have with SVN. Don’t let our children grew up in a world of Centralized Version Control! Just to be sure you realize that this is just a sarcastic blog post. Hope you had some fun reading it!
