svn - Sell me distributed revision control

Question

I know 1000s of similar topics floating around. I read at lest 5 threads here in SO But why am I still not convinced about DVCS?

I have only following questions (note that I am selfishly worried only about Java projects)

• What is the advantage or value of committing locally? What? really? All modern IDEs allows you to keep track of your changes? and if required you can restore a particular change. Also, they have a feature to label your changes/versions at IDE level!?
• what if I crash my hard drive? where did my local repository go? (so how is it cool compared to checking in to a central repo?)
• Working offline or in an air plane. What is the big deal?In order for me to build a release with my changes, I must eventually connect to the central repository. Till then it does not matter how I track my changes locally.
• Ok Linus Torvalds gives his life to Git and hates everything else. Is that enough to blindly sing praises? Linus lives in a different world compared to offshore developers in my mid-sized project?

Pitch me!

Answer 1

I have been where you are now, sceptical of the uses of distributed version control. I had read all the articles and knew the theoretical arguments, but I was not convinced.

Until, one day, I typed git init and suddenly found myself inside a git repository.

I suggest you do the same -- simply try it. Begin with a small hobby project, just to get the hang of it. Then decide if it's worth using for something larger.