Version Control in Gaming Community: SVN versus GIT?

#1 GIT doesn't enforce you distributing it at all, so there's that in favour for just working on projects for yourself. You can set up a server of some sort to distribute to later. Drawbacks are that it's not as easy on the serverside, and the creator, Linus Torvalds, is looking increasingly insane because of the way he's ranting against SVN ;)

SVN has two ways of setting up the server: Either you just live with SSH access and some group permission magic, or you set up WebSVN in Apache with an authentication mechanism of your choosing. I tend to use HTTP-digest thingamies, because it's simplest. There might be PAM methods which hook into the server's authentication.

Both programs work, but only GIT doesn't require you to be online at all times. On the other hand, it is beneficial that all your checkins and checkouts happen live so that other devs notice.

There's also the commercial Perforce, which is often used in the game industry. Solid solution, and you can test it for free with 2 users.

#2 Thanks. I hear Perforce gets high marks from people who use it, but the cost is too high for my 5 person team. The team is too big for a free trial and too small to warrant using anything that costs more than free.

So I think I'm stuck choosing between GIT and SVN/TortoiseSVN. I hear both are good, some people like one or the other. After surfing the forum here, I see lots more people who seem to actually use SVN (and say it works fine) than actually use GIT. When you include the fact that SVN has TortoiseSVN which is a better interface (especially for artists), I'm leaning toward SVN/TortoiseSVN.

Comments?

#3 SVN is my crutch, too :)

#4 GIT works well with SVN. We have some users that use GIT for offline experimental projects, but most of the time we recommend creating branches for that.

For Open Source projects, I highly recommend *not* using GIT and create branches and encourage daily checkins... people tend to disappear after halfway finishing a project and it's a lot better to have something halfway done than it is to have nothing at all.

Of course, all development is done in a branch so that if it's poorly done then we can easily discard it.