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Linux Gazette #147
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SVN
Posted Feb 5, 2008 2:12 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]
From the article:
Subversion is the fastest-growing Software Configuration Management system for distributed development teams and is presently the most successful version control system in the Free Software arena.
This claim is surprising to me. I would have guessed that the most popular VCS in the free-software world would still be CVS, while the tools with the fastest user growth would be distributed version-control systems like git and so on. I'm not sure how to (easily) get quantitative numbers, however.
SVN
Posted Feb 5, 2008 4:50 UTC (Tue) by yarikoptic (subscriber, #36795) [Link]
Although I would favor to see git (package git-core in debian gnu/linux) userbase growing faster than subversion's, but it seems not to be the case at least in Debian land according to Popcon on subversion and git-core
It is partially explained by the fact that in most of use-cases of avg joe "user" git might be overwhelming and SVN would look like a right tool. On the other hand subversion has been out there for a while and there are nice embeddings for it in many IDEs and environments, whenever GIT still lacks that, thus is not very attractive to avg joe user who likes bells-and-whistles (although more I use gitk more I like it ;-)).
just today I was at a job interview at some relatively large company and few interviewers revealed the 'knowledge' about existence of subversion but noone knew what is git, which says about generic trend in faster adoption of subversion than git in industry... Although the 'news' that git is written originally by the author of linux kernel makes good impression and makes people to have a look what beast git is.
git
Posted Feb 5, 2008 9:01 UTC (Tue) by tv (subscriber, #32991) [Link]
Well, git (1.4.x) in stable/etch being unable to properly work with repositories created (or even worked on? I don't know) would seem like quite a barrier to adoption. Yes, there is an updated version in backports, but it is a problem for the casual user.
SVN
Posted Feb 5, 2008 9:42 UTC (Tue) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]
+1 Although I use git almost exclusively (and when I have to, I use git-cvsimport or git-svn to work with legacy repositories; does anybody know about good git-bzr2?), I still see tremendous lack of support outside of the hardcore Linux geeks -- there is no good (and stable/mature) support for git in Eclipse/Anjuta/(not sure about KDevelop), I don't know about any support in Nautilus, or something on the level of cerevisa.
SVN
Posted Feb 5, 2008 19:09 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
There actually is a git-on-Eclipse plugin. It's basically git functionality 100% re-implemented in Java. Don't bother with it, though: it has a few issues and is now quite out of date. The much better way to handle this, of course, would be to slice a libgit out of git's codebase. Eclipse, Anjuta, etc would link against libgit and a single codebase would handle everything. No muss, no fuss. Unfortunately, git was quite consciously written to just abandon memory when when it's done. Just terminating and letting the OS clean everything up is *much* faster than meticulously paging in and freeing every little data structure. Problem is, run this code in a persistent app and what happens? Memory leak city. Scary in scale. So, the Git team are working on cleaning up the leaks and arranging a libgit. It's a huge undertaking though and, last I heard though (6 months ago?) it's still a long way off. Sigh. bzr's Eclipse bindings are pretty darned great BTW. They're definitely worth a look if you want to do distributed-on-Eclipse.
SVN
Posted Feb 6, 2008 9:58 UTC (Wed) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]
Yeah, libgit would be awesome. I was using RCS for a lot of time, and so I have plenty of RCS repositories -- it would be actually better to convert these directory to .git repositories instead of getting through CVS. There is git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/parsecvs for that, but it requires libgit. Oh well.
SVN
Posted Feb 6, 2008 23:52 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I see no reason why a programmatic interface to git's tools that forks them off and talks to them via pipes couldn't be written. It wouldn't even be hard. (I'm not sure it's worth it, though: it's not as if it's difficult for people who need to talk to git via pipes to do so now.)
SVN
Posted Feb 5, 2008 14:33 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
SVN was designed as a direct CVS replacement, and by now it's done a good job of supplanting CVS in most places. The distributed tools are certainly growing fast, but the growth of each is hindered by the fact that there are so many of them, so there isn't an obvious one to choose. At this point it seems like git, Mercurial, and Bazaar are the top contenders, and as a group they might be growing faster than Subversion, but not individually. Also, by now Subversion is mature and well-supported, while the distributed tools are just starting to mature and get support from other tools.