SVN is losing?

Posted Dec 22, 2006 18:45 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

I think what he might be referring to is the slowdown in feature/concept development that svn is seeing. i.e. svn is now reaching the point where it is solid and most of the bold new features are complete. SVN does what it was designed to do. Many of the other projects are probably in heavy development with exciting new features being added all the time. While exciting indeed, it is not necessary what one wants when choosing a VCS system for production.

SVN on the other hand has become a very trusted replacement for CVS, to the point where I believe that it is much more solid than CVS ever was. I just spent my snowday yesterday successfully repairing my svn repository which had one corrupted file in it (corrupted I presume by my hard drive, not SVN.) The amazing part was that I was able to detect it in the first place and fix it with the incredibly nifty svnadmin tool (and some medium weight khexedit work)!

This ability of svn to have detected the corruption in the first place by noticing a checksum error on the data of a versioned file along with the svnadmin dump and load features which allowed me to recreate every transaction in a new repository, gave me more confidence than before this incident happened, that SVN is the right place to store my data as a backup. After all, normal backup methods (non VCS methods) would probably never have caught this error or allowed me to fix it unless I had very old backup data lying around. Since I don't know when this file got mangled, I could have just gone on backing up slightly corrupted data without ever knowing it.

I, for one, am very happy that this is the kind of development happening on svn, the development of very useful admin tools, along with the addition of other minor boring features that help polish svn and signal the entrance of svn into the mature product phase.