You guys laugh but migrating version control systems can be one of the most nightmarish projects an organization chooses to undertake. It's right alongside rewriting mainframe software (that probably has been working for 20 years) and an overhaul of the employee HR systems.
It's scary. It's fraught with pitfalls. But in the end everyone hopes the result is a better tool.
We need more of these writeups. I personally love git. I just think the learning curve is steep. Think you know git? Next day someone teaches you some fancy new command you didn't even know existed.
I think git is really taught wrong in a lot of tutorials. They never focus on workflow and determining what works for you and your team (if you have one). Once you decide on the workflow all the git commands you need become apparent.
It's best to think of Git not as a version control framework but as a library of functions on a directory-tree data structure (edit: with a history). With this mental model, you realize that
1) there's all kinds of crazy things you can do
2) for a given crazy thing someone's probably already done it, and if it's not too far-out there's probably a command for it.
The reflog makes uncollected garbage available to the user, meaning that if you screw up you can just roll back to an old commit, carrying with it an entire history, even if that commit is no longer referenced by the repo.
Your comment doesn't address the parent's comment at all. Moving VCS is hard in any team with more than a few members, especially when the change is coming from a few and not everyone.
I remember my old company moving from MS VSS to svn, all we hear was 'why, VSS works!', even though it was a nightmare compared to svn. Of course the change had a bunch of teething problems and the conservatives pointed and moaned more.
But who in their right mind would say VSS is better than SVN?
Any organisational change is hard, no matter how 'obviously' better it is.
The key that makes things click for me is, the Commit is the most important 'unit' of Git. Tags, branches, pseudo-refs like HEAD are all just mutable or immutable (like tags) pointers to commits.
A company I used to work for attempted to migrate once and nearly gave up, but then realised it was feasible (and not very expensive) if we did not insist on preserving the history.
So the new revisions were kept in Mercurial and the old ones in CVS. A slight inconvenience for the first year, but after that nearly all of the interesting revisions were in the new system.
As for the legacy systems, they already required us to maintain Windows NT4 boxes and a no-longer-supported C compiler, so the additional overhead of a second VCS was tiny by comparison.
We (10-person startup) actually migrated from TFS to Git a few months ago. The technical migration was mostly smooth (found a TFS->Git export tool); like many other people, the main issue's been the DVCS culture shock. I was "lucky" to come on right as we were beginning the migration (which I ended up leading by default), so I haven't had all of the TFSisms to work out of my system that everyone else did.
Migrating source code systems is intense. It's very much a superlinear scaling question - the more people involved, the more training, the more chance for errors, the more miscommunications, the more tooling needed.
Where I work, we've been doing some migrating from ClearCase to Mercurial. Pretty intense work.
Speaking as a long-term Subversion and Perforce user, I'm finding the switch to Git (forced on me by a job change) painful. My old work flow:
1. Commit my code to the central repo.
My new and "improved" Git workflow:
1. Commit my code to my local branch.
2. Push my local branch to the central repo.
As we're using Git as a centralised source control anyway, what is this extra work saving me over using a "traditional" centralised source control? In other words, what's the point in using a decentralised source control system in a centralised manner, and how many teams are truly using Git in a decentralised manner?
For one, you can have much more atomic commits, which can help with maintaining the code and finding and fixing bugs. Just push all of your small commits at the end of the day.
Another benefit I've found--as a student with an internet connection that isn't always on--is that I can still commit without it.
It's also much easier to use branches in Git. If I want to try something weird, or temporarily break some code, it's trivial just to create and use a new branch.
Ultimately, the reason you're not seeing much of an advantage to Git right now is because (from a user's standpoint) it's basically a superset of SVN. Once you get used to it and learn more about it, chances are you'll start improving your workflow to take advantage of more of its features. Git can basically support the same workflow as a centralized system, but it also supports other scheme.
> For one, you can have much more atomic commits, which can help with maintaining the code and finding and fixing bugs. Just push all of your small commits at the end of the day.
This makes it REALLY HARD to keep up with your team members' code, because all you see are huge commit batches at the end of the day containing tons of diffs.
Worse yet, sometimes people use rebase to hide the intermediate commits and you get one huge "Implemented X" commit.
Just commit as you go along. If you're doing something that outright breaks the build or is disruptive, then create a branch -- it's not hard (see below).
> It's also much easier to use branches in Git. If I want to try something weird, or temporarily break some code, it's trivial just to create and use a new branch.
I don't really understand why git users keep repeating this trope.
And then at some future time (or many future times) I can merge in the latest trunk changes (or vis versa). SVN has merge tracking, so it Just Works:
svn merge ^/trunk
I can only assume that this idea that "branches are hard in SVN" is a relic of a time when SVN didn't have merge tracking -- the feature was introduced nearly 4 years ago.
> Git can basically support the same workflow as a centralized system, but it also supports other scheme.
It can, but with more work. I guess I could just alias 'git commit' to 'git commit && git push', but then why am I not just using SVN?
> I don't really understand why git users keep repeating this trope.
You can create a branch in Git without having to touch the main repository. It's a lot cheaper mentally to create a local branch than a globally viewable one. In particular, it's a lot cheaper to create a branch when you don't have to think about whether the work is important enough to deserve one, or if your crazy idea might end up being an embarrassing failure. When a decision only affects yourself, it's a lot easier to be bold.
> SVN has merge tracking, so it Just Works:
SVN can branch easily, and it remembers how a merge went down, but it doesn't know how to merge a branch back into the truck when the truck has since progressed. When SVN merges, it doesn't know if a difference between the two branches is because it was changed on the trunk or on the branch. It just sees a difference.
Git can replay the changes made in the branch on the updated trunk, or vice versa.
> This makes it REALLY HARD to keep up with your team members' code, because all you see are huge commit batches at the end of the day containing tons of diffs.
Git is decentralised. If you think you might get conflicts with some other developer, just ask them to push their branch somewhere public where you can fetch their work and look at what they're doing. Or they can export their commits as a tarball and bring it to you on a USB drive if you have no network connectivity for some reason. :P
> Worse yet, sometimes people use rebase to hide the intermediate commits and you get one huge "Implemented X" commit.
To be honest, this still sounds like a workflow problem. if "Implemented X" is too huge to be a single commit, then the person who pushed it was lazy and didn't bother to spend enough time to make good commits. If it really only "implements X", then even if it is big, it's at least self-contained.
You should spend time thinking about what you commit. It's not just a matter of getting your code somewhere safe; the code in your working directory is the raw material from which you create a new snapshot of the project that represents an improvement. This is really difficult to do with SVN, but it should be your default workflow in git. It's more work beforehand, but it improves code maintainability and makes bisecting more effective.
It's likely that most developers are not disciplined enough to do this for every commit while they're coding. Fortunately, rebasing allows you to defer all that work to just before you push. Not rebasing and just pushing loads of small commits makes it more likely that you will not have a clear history of progression for the project.
How the development actually happened is completely uninteresting in git. Ideally the log is a history of patches applied to the project, each of which changes only one thing, and is complete by itself (later commits can depend on earlier ones, but the reverse should not be true)
> Not rebasing and just pushing loads of small commits makes it more likely that you will not have a clear history of progression for the project.
Disagree, because the commits are merged in and I can clearly walk through them. You should think very carefully about what you're committing and when--but that doesn't make rebase a license to do stupid things to make life harder for other developers, and personally I am completely and entire convinced that that's really all rebase does; I consider it one of the biggest brain damages of git and in pushing the SVN->git migration crusade (because even with rebase stupidity it's vastly better than SVN--I'd prefer Hg, but that ship has sailed) at my current employer I'm pushing to have "don't mash your commits" made into policy.
> How the development actually happened is completely uninteresting in git.
"In git" has no bearing on what is interesting in the development cycle, and it's a little arrogant to claim that that's the case. My version control system does not decide what I find interesting.
Thanks for your comment, its the other schemes beyond a centralised workflow that I have not arrived at yet, as I'm new to Git and not finding it friendly so far (despite years of experience with other systems), I probably just don't get it yet ;-)
One way to look at it: in some ways Git provides a framework for almost any workflow you could possibly want. It optimizes for workflows that major users of Git care about, such as the model followed by the Linux kernel and adopted by many other projects. But Git won't enforce very much structure on you; you impose that on yourself. As a result, you can use it almost exactly like SVN, at which point it'll feel like a gratuitously different SVN. However, as you find and make use of the other possibilities available to you, you'll have more success using Git.
Some of the first things you'll want to look at: doing many small commits, using many lightweight branches, and using commit --amend or rebase -i on local changes to fiddle with them before pushing them. Think of each branch as the result of your work, despite it containing many commits; you can edit the branch as a whole until you get it right, and then push it, much like you'd edit the SVN working copy until ready to run "svn commit". You get to have more structure in your working copy, and keep that structure when you push to the public repository.
One big recommendation, though: learning Git works a lot like learning the UNIX command line. You can learn a pile of individual tools, but it also helps to know the philosophy of how they fit together, so you can more easily string together impressive ad-hoc solutions when you need to. I'd suggest reading more about Git's repository structure, and thinking about it more as a DAG, and how the commands fit in that model.
Forget the centralized/decentralized stuff. At some point almost all git users have a somewhat centralized model.
You say you don't get it yet and I think it's the issue. Coming from years of SVN I was in more or less the same situation (but I choosed to switch so it was obviously less painful). Then I started playing with local branches and funny stuff like that. I can assure you that once you get yet you'll never wan't to go back :)
Try approaching git the way you would learn a programming language. It's more like that than an application. Git is just a good implementation of a simple, consistent, appropriate model (or you could say DSL) for version tracking. It offers this model to the user in a straightforward way. But you have to learn the model or git will seem complicated instead of simple.
In the basic use case (changes into a central repo), git and svn look similar. Git's power is revealed when you realize how it tracks changes individually -- it's super easy to branch and move changes around. The decentralization isn't just on a team level, it's on a per-developer level.
Let's say you have 3 bugs to fix. In SVN you might work on them 1 at a time (start to finish -- hopefully no blockers!), or descend into madness and try to work on all 3 simultaneously. In git, you'd make 3 branches and work on each separately.
Oh, a hotfix came along while you're halfway through a bugfix? In SVN, you cringe: do I manually copy my changes somewhere else and revert? Ugh.
In git, you just make another branch from your clean master, do the hotfix, and pull that change into your bug branches at your leisure. In svn, this branching is theoretically possible, but not used practically -- they are too cumbersome and manual (you need to track what changes went where, and could accidentally apply them twice).
I've written more about it here, if you're interested:
Additionally for working with multiple fixes at the same time git stash -p, git add -p and friends are great tools. I sometimes see a bug when either fixing another bug or implementing a feature. And if that bug is trivial (i.e. it would take less work to fix it right away compared to remembering it) I can fix it right away, and commit it later in a new branch unrelated to the one I was actually working on.
With svn you really do not want to do this since in my experience you can only work at one thing at a time per checked out directory. Instead you have to write it down or try to remember.
> With svn you really do not want to do this since in my experience you can only work at one thing at a time per checked out directory. Instead you have to write it down or try to remember.
I used that all the time when coding with svn, and while not as handy has git stash it is workable.
But what I was specifically referring to is the -p flags of various git commands (stash, reset, add, checkout, ...) so you can interactively only stash away what you wish instead of the entire working directory (or an entire subdirectory of it).
When using git in that way, I spend more time mucking around with cherry picking than I would to just treat things atomically.
The tools are more powerful, but they're also correspondingly more complex, and the net value is in my experience negative.
People simply feel more productive as the number of knobs they're turning increases. However, SCM is the least important knob in my day-to-day development. What matters to me is turning around quick changes with associated unit tests and ultimately committing code that works the first time. The less I think about SCM knobs, the sooner I can move on to the next piece of actual work.
Totally agree. When first learning git, I got comfortable with git stash: work work, bug comes along, git stash, apply bug to master, git stash apply to get back to my state, work work. Then I started getting comfortable with branches.
Git stash is a killer feature that every developer can relate to, and highlights git's power.
The thing I notice is that you weren't using branches with Subversion.
For about 4 years now, I've been doing branch based iterative development. This is a great way for a team of engineers to work together and have a continuous release process.
Meaning, you deploy trunk and do development on 'iterative branches' (ie: you have branches called iteration-0001, iteration-0002, iteration-0003, etc...). All works happens on the iteration branches which are then tested and merged to trunk on a regular basis as part of the release process. If you have work that spans more than one iteration, you make a branch off the current iteration.
Unfortunately, subversion has a very hard time keeping track of development that way. The reason is that if you (and your co-workers) want to work on another branch off of the iteration branches (so you don't hold up a release), then merging changes from the iteration branches into your branch become a nightmare because merge tracking on your branch has no way to know what is happening on the other branches. If you don't do it right, you can end up with a branch that can never be merged back.
The last time I used git in a work environment [1] we named our branches based on the tracking system ID we used. So when I saw a branch labeled US137, I could look that up in the tracking system to see what was being worked on.
Our QA team would then pull the developer's assigned branches into a QA repository, do a merge and test. We had no probems [2] with a team of half a dozen programmers across as many time zones (one in Russia) using that model.
[1] My current employer uses SVN and I was told, in no uncertain terms, "The use of Git is a fireable offense." The lead developer really hates Git.
[2] The problems we did have came from upper management that kept changing their minds about what to work on.
> [1] My current employer uses SVN and I was told, in no uncertain terms, "The use of Git is a fireable offense." The lead developer really hates Git.
Reminds a bit of this quote in LWN from David Woodhouse (a Linux kernel developer at Intel): 'If my corporate overlords told me I had to use my Exchange "messaging" account for external email communication, they would get a quite clear 'no' in response. My response may also contain suggestions that they use certain other objects for purposes for which they were not designed.'
More seriously, it sounds like someone who had a bad experience with Git at one point got put in an undeserved position of power in which they got to enforce the results of that bad experience on everyone else.
> More seriously, it sounds like someone who had a bad experience with Git at one point got put in an undeserved position of power in which they got to enforce the results of that bad experience on everyone else.
I set technical direction and while using git isn't a firable offense, we will never support it as the official SCM system.
The reason is quite simple: in a centralized environment, it increases costs and complexity and provides no value to offset that.
We don't want:
- People hiding their work in local branches where none of the other engineers can follow along.
- Getting massive rebased commits once every day (or worse yet, every few days).
- An open-source Linux-inspired development model consisting of a massively distributed ecosystem of competing/disparate/intertwined branches.
That right there, tells me that you have never actually used git in a team environment with a good workflow enough to actually learn about its advantages and disadvantages. Sure, git is not perfect, but to boldly say that it offers no value in a centralized environment is, ah, how shall I say it... self-assured to the point of trollishness.
I, and many many other people have used git for years, both in centralized environments and not, and I can tell you that git (and more broadly, any decentralized VCS) has tons of useful features in a centralized environment compared to SVN/CVS and their ilk. Just off the top of my head, features I could not live without now:
- much more powerful branch merge tracking
- much better conflict resolution compared to CVS/SVN.
- partial commits
- history rewriting (massively useful in cleaning up before pushing)
- ability to work without network connection
- ability to cherry pick commits between branches
The problems you described are failures of workflow due to bad process and/or bad developer education, _not_ failures inherent in the design of any given distributed VCS. I have never had to deal with any of those issues, because we have always ensured that we have a good workflow in place.
The problems you described are failures of workflow due to bad process and/or bad developer education, _not_ failures inherent in the design of any given distributed VCS. I have never had to deal with any of those issues, because we have always ensured that we have a good workflow in place.
Most of the features you're discussing encourage that workflow/bad process/bad developer behavior, because they were built entirely to support Linux's development methodology in which that behavior isn't not considered a hindrance.
Like I said, neither I, nor my team mates had issues that you describe, nor do I see evidence of this behaviour in Linux development methodology from what I read on the mailing lists. Just because a suboptimal workflow may be created with git, it does not mean you should forgo its power altogether - in fact, one of the main "features" of git that people describe is that it can support more than one way of working in a team.
However, you clearly have your mind made up, so, let us leave it at that.
There's a big difference between "not the official SCM system" and "a fireable offence". As a developer, I frequently use a pile of tools that don't have official support, because they help me get my job done more effectively than the "official" tools. Sometimes those end up becoming the official tools later, sometimes they don't.
But in any case, some of the issues you've listed represent bugs in development processes, not in Git.
> - People hiding their work in local branches where none of the other engineers can follow along.
Good developers using Git don't "hide their work" in local branches any more than they "hide their work" in an editor before they save it; sometimes you just have work in progress that shouldn't get pushed yet. (I certainly hope you have policies about when to commit, which include things like "the code compiles" or "passes tests" or "smells right"; if so, why aren't you concerned about people "hiding their work" in their uncommitted working copies?) If that work in progress has a sufficiently large scope that it needs more developers involved, then the branch may want to live in a repository accessible to others.
Before I had git-svn, when I had to work with SVN repositories, I ended up having several local copies of the repository, and doing the "small self-contained commits" thing manually by copying bits into and out of working copies. Git provided much more structure to that process, as well as making it faster and more efficient.
> - Getting massive rebased commits once every day (or worse yet, every few days).
Don't do that. You can and should push arbitrarily often.
> - An open-source Linux-inspired development model consisting of a massively distributed ecosystem of competing/disparate/intertwined branches.
If you have a project anywhere near as large as the Linux kernel, you'd be lucky to end up that well organized and optimized. But while you still have a team that can regularly communicate with each other on a list low-volume enough for people to read all the mails, you don't really need that ecosystem of hierarchical branches and repositories; nonetheless, you can get a lot of value out of Git even when using it with a single central repository.
I've come to see the key distinction between git and SVN as:
* Old workflow: "commit code" and "share code with team" are jumbled together.
* New workflow: "commit code" and "share code with team" are separate actions.
This looks so obvious, but coming from years of using SVN, it took me a while to understand the implications. With git I could fix (with commit --amend) those embarrassing "whoops, forgot to add an untracked file" kinds of mistakes. Over time, I found that my local commits became smaller and more frequent because I can reorder and squash them before pushing (or git-svn dcommitting, as most of my clients run SVN).
Consider a larger change where you might implement it one way, decide you were on the wrong track, back off a bit and implement it some other. With SVN these false paths are either in the common repository confusing the history, or I'm in a disconnected state for an uncomfortably long time. With git, all these changes are local commits that are ultimately kept out of the main history because I've reordered the change history into something comprehensible.
It took me a few months to grok git. Reading an article on the filesystem structure of the repository helped me a great deal.
It's saving you because you can freely commit without ever running into a conflict suprisingly.
Deal with the merges and conflicts when you want to. Also, it's lot faster to commit. You shouldn't be pushing out every commit -- just commit a lot and when you want others to see it, push it.
You can also freely branch and merge between your own private branches, without making everybody else see these numerous branches polluting the file hierarchy of the central repo.
More generally, I never liked how to cvs and subversion a branch is basically just a copy at the file level. That mixes version control metadata among the file paths that are themselves being version controlled.
THIS. I worked at an organization with ~700 branches with names all pretty much meaningless for a single project, when maybe 10 were actually being developed on. Makes it almost impossible to understand the repo.
I could commit pretty freely using Subversion or Perforce to. As for the faster Git commits, is that just because you are only commiting locally? You still have the overhead of pushing to your central repo. Reading the original article, it seems his reason for switching to Git can be summed up in one word: Github.
> I could commit pretty freely using Subversion or Perforce to.
Pretty freely is not freely. That's like having 'decent' freedom of speech, y'see. Git allows you to commit any time, so fast you won't even notice the pause.
> As for the faster Git commits, is that just because you are only commiting locally? You still have the overhead of pushing to your central repo.
Yes, it's faster because it only commits locally. You should not push every commit to the central repo, and you should be committing more or less every time you change a file. Git allows you to be far more granular than SVN or perforce did.
It also allows you to throw things away and try things out without worrying about hurting someone else. Branching in SVN/Perforce is simply not worth the effort, but on Git, it's trivial.
But in svn or p4 those commits are visible to everyone else immediately. With git they are only visible when you are ready to make them so - and you can amend or merge them into a single commit or slice them however you want beforehand.
Having your own private repo other than what is on the server allows you to experiment and make a lot more mistake without affecting others.
This, and branches. I rarely used branches in svn, but I branch all the time in git locally.
If you try to use git like svn, it's pretty frustrating. Seems like a lot of work for no gain. But if you embrace the git philosophy of commit early and often and local feature branches, you'll understand how git got so popular.
In svn, I often run into the situation where I'm working on a new feature, want to save what I've done (because it works), but it's not ready to check into the central repo. Then I usually do something that breaks the whole thing locally, but I have no way of undoing that change since nothing has been committed yet. I've seen svn users copy and paste entire directories just to "snapshot" their work. With git and local commits, you don't have this problem. You "save" your progress as you go along by committing it locally and when something breaks, you revert locally. Then when your feature is ready, you push the whole thing to the central repo.
> My new Git workflow: code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, push
Likewise, but mine frequently looks like this: branch, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, rebase -i, rebase branch on master, code, commit, rebase branch on master, merge, push.
This is like asking "what's the advantage of driving an Audi S5 over a model T, don't they both get you from point A to B?"
Git is a far more advanced tool compared to SVN. It will enable you to do things that SVN is not capable of, and it will save you from trouble that would have resulted in a multi-day firedrill in SVN.
For example, with Git you can maintain local history on your desktop quite easily. Since there won't ever be conflicts, committing is effortless. But now you have the ability to rollback to a previous state quite easily, far beyond the ctrl-z capabilities of your favorite IDE.
Also, in general with Git merging your changes into the central repo ought to be easier than it was previously. If there are conflicts they'll be easier to sort out, for example.
Agreed about conflicts. One of the things that surprised me the most with git, coming from subversion, was how much easier it was to merge code and how there were less conflicts and how they were often much easier to resolve.
I tried to do mostly branched development in subversion but gave up on that due to all conflicts.
One of the downsides of git (and mercurial and others) being evangelized so heavily as next generation distributed version control systems is that some of the more fundamental improvements get passed over. These are world-class version control systems, even discounting their dvcs capabilities. If you do a merge with git/hg vs svn or even perforce or TFS you'll get about as good an experience and a workflow as is possible.
While I'm sure others can address all of the many advantages of git, it's one of those things you don't realize how much you "need" it until you have it, then you take its power for granted until you are stuck using svn. Think iPad, running water, the wheel, a spreadsheet application, or any variety of things.
I'm an engineer at Etsy and went through this transition. I am certainly no expert on either svn or git. To mirror closely how i used svn means i need to run a couple more git commands per push, a little annoying but no big deal.
I think the real pain comes when there are problems. How do i unfuck what i just did?. You're getting stressed out, there are people waiting on you to get your commits in. I had my flow down with svn, but now what do i do? Compound that with 100 engineers experiencing that on some level as we transitioned, it was trying.
It's true of changing any tool or workflow, though. You rely on muscle memory or run on auto-pilot and suddenly you don't know what to expect from your day.
I have to agree with the article. GitHub's git tutorial is a lot more useful and easier to follow than the other git articles I found online.
My only complaint about learning git is the lack of distinction between what is a keyword and what isn't. The command line syntax is chock full of words. In particular, "upstream" was the most confusing thing for me starting out. Only much later did I realise that there was nothing special about "upstream". It's just an arbitrary name for a remote repo, but you wouldn't know that as a newbie reading these tutorials. It is only by convention that upstream has a special meaning.
Actually, @{upstream} has a special meaning, and is a refname for the current branch's upstream. For example:
# commits that are on the current branch but not upstream
git log @{upstream}..
# commits that are upstream but not on the current branch
git log ..@{upstream}
# the commit path between the current branch and upstream
# (all commits are exclusive to either branch)
git log ...@{upstream}
We had an entire orgs source-code in one SVN repository. It was useful for moving files from one project to the next to keep history and enabled anyone in the org to easily commit to any project.
Obviously that wasn't scalable. (My inbox of commit log emails was insane.) So we transitioned to git. Plus, most of the engineers were already using git-svn. It just took someone who had a free weekend to "git svn clone" and move everyone over to that.
It was PAINFUL at first. I was one of the grumpy people, but after I got the hang of git, I am so glad we just ripped the bandaid off.
Moral of the story: If you're on SVN right now, abandon it as soon as possible. Moving even a 2000 commit repo is no fun, especially when there are more developers involved.
"If you can deal with your current source code system, do not go through this pain. Seriously. This was a long, painful process for us. Over the years, many tools, systems, and processes had become deeply intertwined with our subversion installation. That said, if your team is small, or your source control system isn’t tied into anything, go for it! Just do it as soon as possible – the only time better than today was yesterday."
The first half of that paragraph basically says that it very well might be more painful to switch to git than it is to keep using your existing system.
Indeed. SVN is far from the worst source control system out there, and even as we move on to better once, it's pointedly the system that got a lot of coders into using source control.
I certainly like SVN's status as a "better CVS", and from that perspective they succeeded nicely. If nothing else, SVN has a much saner repository structure that makes it possible to migrate to a modern version control system, whereas the tools for migrating a CVS repository involve huge pain and sometimes guesswork, depending on how heavily people manually hacked the repo's RCS files and how deeply they used CVS's awful branching.
Hm, I've run many a 5000+ revision subversion repository through git-svn and had no issues. I'm not a git evangelist, but the tools for migrating from subversion are pretty good.
My usual way of interacting with any svn repository is to run the entire history through git-svn, a command which takes all of five seconds to issue. There are a few extra niceties to consider when the switch is permanent, like setting up an AUTHORS identity map for the import and maybe gathering public keys for a gitolite, but the tooling side is entirely painless.
It's scary. It's fraught with pitfalls. But in the end everyone hopes the result is a better tool.
We need more of these writeups. I personally love git. I just think the learning curve is steep. Think you know git? Next day someone teaches you some fancy new command you didn't even know existed.
I think git is really taught wrong in a lot of tutorials. They never focus on workflow and determining what works for you and your team (if you have one). Once you decide on the workflow all the git commands you need become apparent.