My friend Jay wrote a blog post today that says that you can use 'svn patch' as poor man's replacement for git-stash. Fair enough, I've heard of places that use patch as full-on replacement for source control and integration as well. :-)
First of all, I want to point out that we still use Subversion as our main code ghetto at work.
Git fully supports updating from svn and pushing changes back, so even if you have to use Subversion at work, you don't have to use it on your local machine.
The difference is that I have our entire history of source code commits on my machine in not even twice the space than it takes for my Subversion checkout (969M vs 578M). I also can do fast local branching and checkins, without worrying about being connected to the network.
Here's a real example of how we used git today at work that I never would have done with Subversion.
I started working on a feature yesterday on my laptop that is going to take a few days to finish. When I got to work today I decided to pair with my coworker Krishna to continue working on it.
In the pre-git world we would have had to either huddle around my laptop, check in the broken code to Subversion to check it out on our other machine, or do a patch of just the changes related to that feature and transfer it to and apply it on the pairing machine.
Not today though. Today I just fired up git-daemon on my machine and did a 'git pull' of the feature branch onto the pairing machine. At the end of the day I just did a 'git push' back to my machine to get all of the changes we made today back so that I could continue working on it tonight.
Even better than that though, I can not continue working on it tonight.
Git makes branching and merging so fast and easy that I can rewind all of the changes that I've made to the code base to support that feature, fix a showstopper bug, check that change into the subversion repo, and then merge the feature branch back on top without even worrying about it.
Git is starting to change the way that I do development. I can finally use branches the way that I've always wanted to. I can finally have several features in development at once on different branches, because it's so easy to switch and merge between them.
Even if you're stuck with Subversion as your backbone, you can still grow outside of it.