Why is distributed source control considered harder?
- by Will Robertson
It seems rather common (around here, at least) for people to recommend SVN to newcomers to source control because it's "easier" than one of the distributed options. As a very casual user of SVN before switching to Git for many of my projects, I found this to be not the case at all.
It is conceptually easier to set up a DCVS repository with git init (or whichever), without the problem of having to set up an external repository in the case of SVN.
And the base functionality between SVN, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar all use essentially identical commands to commit, view diffs, and so on. Which is all a newcomer is really going to be doing.
The small difference in the way Git requires changes to be explicitly added before they're committed, as opposed to SVN's "commit everything" policy, is conceptually simple and, unless I'm mistaken, not even an issue when using Mercurial or Bazaar.
So why is SVN considered easier? I would argue that this is simply not true.
