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copied!<p>"<a href="http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/#svn" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Why Git is Better than X</a>" outlines the various pros and cons of Git vs other SCMs.</p> <p>Briefly:</p> <ul> <li>Git tracks <strong>content rather than files</strong></li> <li><strong>Branches are lightweight</strong> and merging is <em>easy</em>, and I mean <em>really easy</em>.</li> <li>It's distributed, basically every repository is a branch. It's much easier to develop concurrently and collaboratively than with Subversion, in my opinion. It also makes <strong>offline</strong> development possible.</li> <li>It <strong>doesn't impose any workflow</strong>, as seen on <a href="http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/#svn" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the above linked website</a>, there are many workflows possible with Git. A Subversion-style workflow is easily mimicked.</li> <li>Git repositories are much <strong>smaller in file size</strong> than Subversion repositories. There's only one ".git" directory, as opposed to dozens of ".svn" repositories (note Subversion 1.7 and higher <a href="http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.7.html#wc-ng" rel="nofollow noreferrer">now uses a single directory</a> like Git.)</li> <li>The <strong>staging</strong> area is awesome, it allows you to see the changes you will commit, commit partial changes and do various other stuff.</li> <li><strong>Stashing</strong> is invaluable when you do "chaotic" development, or simply want to fix a bug while you're still working on something else (on a different branch).</li> <li>You can <strong>rewrite history</strong>, which is great for preparing patch sets and fixing your mistakes (<em>before</em> you publish the commits)</li> <li>… and a <em>lot</em> more.</li> </ul> <p>There are some disadvantages:</p> <ul> <li>There aren't many good GUIs for it yet. It's new and Subversion has been around for a lot longer, so this is natural as there are a few interfaces in development. Some good ones include <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">TortoiseGit</a> and <a href="http://mac.github.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">GitHub for Mac</a>.</li> <li><del>Partial checkouts/clones of repositories are not possible at the moment (I read that it's in development). However, there is submodule support.</del> <a href="http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/RelNotes-1.7.0.txt" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Git 1.7+ supports sparse checkouts</a>.</li> <li>It might be harder to learn, even though I did not find this to be the case (about a year ago). Git has recently improved its interface and is quite user friendly.</li> </ul> <p>In the most simplistic usage, Subversion and Git are pretty much the same. There isn't much difference between:</p> <pre><code>svn checkout svn://foo.com/bar bar cd bar # edit svn commit -m "foo" </code></pre> <p>and</p> <pre><code>git clone git@github.com:foo/bar.git cd bar # edit git commit -a -m "foo" git push </code></pre> <p>Where Git really shines is branching and working with other people.</p>

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