Roland’s Blog

I just converted the main repositories for two libraries that I maintain, libibverbs and libmthca, from subversion to git. And even though I work with git a lot when working on the kernel, it’s still a shock to see how much easier git makes everything.

A few amusing examples:

$ du -sh libibverbs.*
980K    libibverbs.git
1.3M    libibverbs.svn

Yes, the git checkout with full development history takes up less disk space than a svn working copy with just the tip of the trunk (accessing history goes over the network for svn). And svn needing the network to do stuff has implications beyond just “work on my laptop on a plane”:

$ cd libibverbs.svn
$ time svn log > /dev/null

real    0m0.820s
user    0m0.032s
sys     0m0.004s

$ cd ../libibverbs.git
$ time git log > /dev/null

real    0m0.005s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.000s

Yes, git is more than 100 times faster for showing the log!

And these performance differences make a real productivity difference. With git, I’m much more likely to look through the history, examine past changes, and so on, which means that I waste less time figuring out things that I used to know.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 12:19 pm and is filed under hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.