What's so great about git?

Question

For someone coming from a more conventional VCS background (CVS/SVN), what are the most compelling reasons to learn and migrate to git?

Please comment upon a team's required technical ability in order to make git work. I've seen smart people climb the learning curve and still lose some hair over it. Can anyone climb this curve, or is git not for all teams?

Of course I also want to hear about functional benefits, tool support, integration other systems (CI, etc)...

(This seems like an obvious question, but I didn't find a duplicate of this despite a few searches)

EDIT Links to good resources also appreciated.

Answer 1

On the top of my head:

• its distributed aspect (each developer has a copy of the repository)
• The ability to handle complex merges very quickly
• the possibility to switch from task to task, shelve his work, go back to it...
• cheap branching (instant switch: it just writes a few bits in a file! And it does not consider a branch as a directory like SVN does)

The main difficulty is to establish a workflow between the different repos, without breaking the history of what has already been published (pushed to a public repo).

_{(source: infoq.com)}

The rebase in particular can be difficult to use correctly at first, since it does rewrite the history of a branch, and that changes the SHA1 which is associated with it: to a public branch, that means lots of merges from the other developers pulling from it.