I’ve been using SVN for years at work, and used it a little bit for personal projects.  It’s good enough but as I travel a lot and don’t always have a connection to my repository, it can be a bit of a pain.

Most of my personal projects are worked on by 1 or 2 people, so collaboration isn’t my main concern (although, maybe it should be).

About a year ago I started using bzr for my personal projects.  This was a great improvement for me as I could commit to my local branches when on a bus, or without internet for whatever reason, and push to my web server whenever the chance arose. I was happy enough with bzr and stayed out of the whole bzr vs git thing as it didn’t really concern me.

Then the whole Gnome DVCS thing kicked off which piqued my interest in trying out git. This coincided with me bumping into my old friend Rick on a drunken night out.  As usual, we bored our friends a little and talked about coding and this time git.  He was pretty enthusiastic about it so I thought I’d give it a shot.  Why not, my projects are fairly small so I don’t have a team to migrate over, just me.

I found Tailor and used that to convert a couple of my smaller projects to git.  I read some documentation and found a cheat sheet and then started playing.

So far, it’s been all good.  I’ve not had a hard time learning the UI, no harder than learning bzr’s anyway.  It seems quicker, but the one thing that makes me want to stay with git over bzr (or anything else) is the really quick and easy branching.  I found myself creating new branches to try out new ideas and features.  Even for really little silly things.  It was quick and painless to branch and merge.  Where as with svn and bzr I would have one or two branches for various bits of development + 1 per release, I quickly had 5 branches in git for different ideas and features I wanted to work on.  Merging the changes across different branches was painless, and deleting those ‘what if’ branches that really were going nowhere was easy too.  Although I still have to try pushing to a remote host, it doesn’t seem hard.

I think I’m going to stick with git for a long time.  I can’t see any reason not to use it.  It is as easy to use as bzr (for my use case), it’s fast and above all, its branching and merging are fantastic.  If you are a bzr user, and have been putting off trying git, now is a good time to do it.  I’m glad I did, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

What are your experiences with git, bzr or any other version control software?