The Transition from Centralized (Subversion) VCS to Decentralized (Git) VCS: A Holistic Approach

Abstract

In recent years, software development in software industries has witnessed a transition from Centralized Version Control Systems (CVCSs) to Decentralized Version Control Systems (DVCSs) due to a number of reasons like time, space, branching, merging, offline commits and builds and repository. Both centralized VCSs like subversion, mercurial, perforce, CVS, etc. and distributed VCSs like Git have gone through ample investigations in the recent past, but individually from the software developer’s point of view in a large commercial software industry. There has not been much focus on the transition across Git and Subversion. Git has a share of more than three-fourths of total VCS and Subversion has a share of 13.5%. The paper investigates the transition process from Subversion VCS to Git VCS. Two major tools, Svn2Git and SubGit, used for transition from Subversion to Git, have been explored in terms of cost, support, resources, safety, dependence, rework, data loss etc. None of the available migration tools, including Svn2Git and SubGit, has three capabilities, namely, pre-migration, during migration and post-migration capabilities, which are essential for a complete migration from Subversion to Git. All three capabilities are explored along with the research areas in Subversion and Git migration.

Keywords: Version Control System (VCS), Decentralized Version Control System (DVCS), Centralized Version Control System (CVCS), Transition, Svn2Git, SubGit, Premigration, Postmigration