A very long time ago I mentioned on Twitter that I was looking at Git as a replacement for Subversion and Perforce with my personal projects, but lamented moving to Git at Slide would not be feasible
Like most disagreements I've had with people on technology in the past, immediately after I said it, I actively tried to prove myself wrong. Back in April when I made the statement above, Subversion 1.4 was "good enough" (just barely) for what we wanted to do as far as source control, but I became more and more curious about whether or not we could move to Git.


Back in April, after spending a week with projects like Tailor and git-svn(1) I started to look at the potential of moving just my team over to Git for evaluation purposes. By the end of May I had requested Git to be installed on the machines that we use for development on a day-to-day basis and we moved the team over to Git by the second week of June.

What followed were six months of sloshing uphill, some of the most notable milestones that we had to figure out in this time frame were:
  • Whereas in the Subversion architecture with a central repository there is a very clear development focal point for sharing code between developers, what is this in the Git workflow?
  • How do you ensure developers don't forget code was committed "in that one branch, in that one repository" and keep track of code
  • How will Git integrate with Hudson, Trac and our other pieces of development infrastructure? (answered here)
I'll be answering these questions and share some of the scripts, hooks, and documentation we've written internally to make moving to Git throughout the company a reality. I wish I could say I was responsible for it all, but there were a number of other engineers that were extremely important in defining best practices, and what this shiny new world without Subversion would look like.

At the end of the day, I'm pleased as punch with the transition. I don't hate Subversion, I just love Git; call me "spoiled" but I think we deserve something more than a system that strives to be "a better CVS".

Update: I've posted an addendum: Why we chose Git, a rebuttal

Did you know! Slide is hiring! Looking for talented engineers to write some good Python and/or JavaScript, feel free to contact me at tyler[at]slide