SVN and GIT commit history & code differences

Question

Where are the log messages , commit history and code differences are stored in SVN & GIT. How are they different in terms of maintaining commit history and code differences?

Answer 1

The commit history are in svn log and git log. The code differences are svn diff and git diff respectively; (as you can see there are a lot of similarities between the two already ;) ).

The difference between how they maintain commit history/code differences is very very minute. Once you commit a change to the repository (with either VCS), they don't go away. Those changes are always in the repository in whatever branch you commit them in. The differences between git and svn comes from the other various features of the two systems (such as re-basing in git or using svn externals in svn, as an example).

Now, viewing diffs via the command line can be rather.. Verbose to some extent (read: ugly). I would recommend something like git-extensions or TortoiseSVN for viewing diffs as you will have a much cleaner (and easier to use) interface for seeing the differences between two versions.