I really love Git, the distributed source code management designed by Linus Torvald. It is VERY easy to setup a new local repository (just type git init in the root of your working directory). I do it all the time, even for a simple bash script creation. Even for the simple text files I use as TODO lists.

A few days ago, I add to work offline in an old SVN checkout. I wish I could have used git-svn but it was an old checkout, and I was offline now. So much for git-svn for now…​

I had to find something to be able to undo my changes while I was offline. So why not try Git in a local SVN checkout ? After all, the only thing that Git does is to create a .git file, it does not modify the local files if I don’t want to.

So, at the root of my SVN checkout directory :

git init

Then, I must hide the .svn metadata directory, so I modify .git/info/exclude and I add the line _:

.svn

Now Git will ignore the .svn directories and I can type :

git add .

git commit

Now at least I can regularly commit my changes into Git and go back in time if

I badly break my unit tests during my TDD session. Of course when I’ll be back online

and I’ll commit into the SVN repository I’ll lose the commit history in Git, but as I

was offline anyway, at least I could work with a safety net.

Even used in this unusual way, Git is still useful.