I was concerned when git emerged because suddenly these organizations were riven across multiple version control systems. The CEO, the CFO, the graphic designers, the marketing team -- all of these people started using different tools, such as Basecamp or Google docs. And the computer programmers used git. I suspect this hurts an organization somewhat, chopping up its version control over so many different tools.
I'm curious if anyone thinks it is possible for git to ever catch up to Subversion in terms of ease of use?
I think git popularized versioning systems in the first place as many developers just didn't use them at all.
I hoped that versioning would become more user friendly. I remember offices with non-developers that used tools like Tortoise SVN for Windows, which is just insanely practical. Maybe there are already tools like that for git as well, but I haven't encountered them yet. Instead people use bad cloud sync software, which may solve some additional use cases. Problem is that most of these services are trash with bad performance.
But in the end, if SVN is used by non-developers it would still provide a massive benefit, it doesn't have to be git.
However, for a lot of business documents you want a single current version, with a history - Google Docs, Office 365 and similar give that to people in more user-friendly way than either Git or Subversion does, which is why they use it.
There are numerous web front ends for git such as github and bitbucket that are highly accessible to non-developers.
Certainly people complain that the index exists, like it's so hard that they have to type "git add" and then "git commit" and then "git push".
My counter to that is that git has sufficient complexity to be able to recover from operator errors more than any other version control system. I remember the very limited branching model in CVS where it was only really practical to do all the real development in the HEAD branch and just do maintenance for numbered versions. I remember how easy it was to completely destroy a Visual Source Safe repository.
In Git I've got no fear that some little mistake such as a typo in a commit message or checking changes into the wrong branch can't be fixed easily and that was not true for Subversion or any other system. This fact alone is a good reason why Git is a good choice for a project that has non-developer users because it means if they make mistakes due to a less-than-perfect conceptual understanding it is no big deal.
If SVN was so great for these non-developer use-cases, they could all still be using SVN. Just because the devs moved on to git, doesn't mean that SVN was made unavailable to these people. TortiseSVN still makes releases.
I only use Git as a SVN replacement anyway, when anything goes wrong, I follow xkcd and clone from scratch, plain and simple.
Are there really any SVN instances of import in the private sector out there any more?