Git vs. SVN

Just today, I got it. I understand why people were going gaga about Git when it first came out. I’ll tell you what made the lightbulb go off.

Before today, in order to update this Wordpress install I would have to download an archive from the Wordpress site and extract it over top of the files that I already had. It was time consuming!

So I decided to use Subversion to keep my install up to date, using this guide. With Subversion, now my updates could be done with a single click.

The problem is, whatever modifications I make to the code, Subversion thinks that I am a developer for Wordpress and can commit the changes back upstream. So I get all the perks of pulling straight from the source, with all the hassle of manually tracking changes that I’ve made. I have not solved my problem! I still need to be careful which files I modify and have to keep track of changes!

Git on the other hand, allows you to keep your changes locally and simply push and pull changes as you see fit. If you are like me, where you use a versioning tool to keep code up to date, while making site-specific changes that will never be sent upstream, Git really makes sense.