John Fremlin's blog: On the greatness of git

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Version control has come a long way since the days of RCS/CVS and their lame .NET clone, subversion. The most popular modern system is git. Additionally, there are now many other decent systems: for example, darcs2 and mercurial (but I haven't used them much).

Despite now being a feature-loaded mature system, git is written by real programmers who believe that what is important is the quality of the software and not the self-satisfaction and sense of entitlement of the community around it. Git isn't based on a lot of lamer-support screencasts. It is written in C, on purpose to keep out the .NET programmers, and stands on its own merits and has documentation for grown-ups. Unfortunately, subversion is committed to a more aggressive marketing strategy and has managed to set the emotional framework which people use to consider version control.

Several otherwise reasonable developers that I have personally spoken too have been indoctrinated to believe that git is not a good option for a centrally controlled repository. This is utter rubbish. You can take advantage of the efficiency, powerful merge and history rewriting features of git without descending into chaos. You do not lose control by upgrading from slowversion to git. Using git will not give your project over to the anarchists. Git works really well with a central repository and is in fact designed for an email patch flow.

If you don't want to read the copious, up to date documentation and are familiar with CVS commands, then easygit might be for you. It translates CVS commands to git commands.

Secondly, yes, git does support MS Windows. There are several MS Windows clients. There are also numerous graphical clients. Though I haven't used them myself many seem quite featureful.

Thirdly, git supports anything you might want when it comes to checking out or reverting files. It also supports plenty of stuff for rewriting commit history which I guess is its main competitive advantage relative to other modern revision control systems like darcs.

For an example I was asked about, if you want to get a particular version of a file or set of files, do

git whatchanged ${file}

git reset ${commit-name} -- ${file}

In conclusion, there are few good reasons to ever use slowversion. It is substandard and should be allowed to fade from the page of time.