Moving from SVN to ...?

Question

I'm currently working in a team where we're "using" a subversion repository. I say "using", because in reality, everyone's just editing files directly on a server through samba shares, while every once in a while our architect does a commit from that server with our changes, which are then pushed out to servers.

So basically we're missing out on being able to have meaningful commit messages from different users, and being able to commit as often as we like.

I've been trying to spark some interest about distributed systems, and how the workflow that we have seems like it could be set up very nicely with something like git (us committing on our local machines and then pushing changesets to him for review) but i don't feel that i have enough experience with git. Most of my DVCS experience has been with mercurial.

Everyone is pretty much working in a windows environment using tortoisesvn, and that's the way they're used to interacting with the system, but they occasionally use PuTTY to work on one of the linux servers, and know how to do a commandline commit.

What is the way to go with this, i've seen some of the work being done to create gateways between SVN and some DVCS'es, does anyone have any experience setting up and working in such an environment?

How about full-scale migrations from SVN to a DVCS?

Answer 1

If your team can't understand how to use subversion well, I don't know how you will be able to get them to understand git. Especially since they are in the mindset of "lets all work in the same working copy," they are going to have a hard time grasping a distributed version control system.

In my experience, to use svn-git, you have to know how to use git AND you have to know how to use svn. I'd recommend teaching them to use svn correctly.

Answer 2

Is there a reason you don't want to just keep your SVN repository, and use it in the way that SVN is intended to be used?

Why not just have everybody checkin and merge, use branches, etc? Why switch if you have a repository setup?