> You grant that permission to the person legitimately checking out code, but not to the person finding or stealing a laptop with a clone of a repository. The latter is a side-effect of how a DVCS works.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. What difference is there (not that you would allow checkouts on unencrypted laptops anyway)?
> In SVN you don't even need to expose the full history, you can grant access to the last revision only.
> In SVN for example you can restrict people to single directories (or even files - I don't remember exactly). That at least is impossible in git. I can prevent pushes using hooks but not reads.
These restrictions may be useful in some cases, but I would wager that they are far more seldom than some of the advantages of git (like being able to work offline).
I'm not sure what you're getting at. What difference is there (not that you would allow checkouts on unencrypted laptops anyway)?
> In SVN you don't even need to expose the full history, you can grant access to the last revision only.
> In SVN for example you can restrict people to single directories (or even files - I don't remember exactly). That at least is impossible in git. I can prevent pushes using hooks but not reads.
These restrictions may be useful in some cases, but I would wager that they are far more seldom than some of the advantages of git (like being able to work offline).