Subversion considers its future [LWN.net]

Subversion considers its future

Posted May 2, 2008 1:07 UTC (Fri) by dberlin (subscriber, #24694) [Link]

I only know the stats for Google Code, and it has > 30000 projects that have at least one
commit a week for the past 2 months.

This also totally changes the guy's crazy assertions about nobody using Subversion and CVS.

He's obviously off in some strange world where everyone uses git.

That is not to say there aren't high profile projects that use git, but to claim that
subversion/cvs is the exception rather the rule is really really really out of touch.

Subversion considers its future

Posted May 2, 2008 9:15 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

This also totally changes the guy's crazy assertions about nobody using Subversion and CVS.

It all comes down to selection bias. Even at the time SVN was started, it was clear that it was the wrong approach, merely papering over the cracks in CVS, rather than redoing things properly. The concept of distributed version control was already being bandied about, and with the release of BitKeeper shortly afterwards, it was clear that it was the right way to go. And yet I remember reading a Joel On Software article a while back (fairly recently, only a year or two ago) where he claimed that one of the things needed to keep your developers happy was an SVN server. I did a double take, because SVN was so completely out of left field. I couldn't believe that any sane developer would choose SVN for a new project. That's because, in the circles I move in, it's not even considered. But the fact is, people like me are vastly outnumbered by mainstream developers, most of whom have never even heard of distributed version control, and nearly all of whom use SVN (or Visual SourceSafe). It's hard to overstate the extent to which these people are invisible to certain sections of the community. If you don't work in a corporate environment, and few of the open source projects you see are using SVN, why would you think that SVN is widely used?

Subversion considers its future

Posted May 2, 2008 13:39 UTC (Fri) by joib (guest, #8541) [Link]

There's still plenty of high profile FLOSS projects using SVN, and even CVS (!!). Gnome, KDE,
inkscape, gimp, blender use SVN, openoffice.org uses CVS. Much of the toolchain (whose
developers, if anything, should be the "alpha" geeks running headfirst into git, right?) use
CVS (autotools, GDB, glibc, binutils) or SVN (GCC). Emacs is apparently converting from CVS to
bzr.

Given how widespread CVS still is years after SVN has been stable (and that is pretty close to
a no-op upgrade for users), I don't hold much hope for any rapid migration to DVCS:es. Which
is a bit sad, since IMHO mercurial and git are really good (I don't have experience with
others so I'll refrain from commenting on them), but there's not much one can do about it.

WHAT are you developing then?

Posted May 2, 2008 19:16 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Apparently you are not using GNU toolchain (still developed with CVS and SVN), you are not using projects on sourceforce and/or code.google.com (things like Python and DocBook), you don't use GNOME and KDE... looks like you are working on another planet!

Either that or you are just ignoring the fact that 90% of things you use in your work are not done with DVCS - and if 90% of tools you are using are invisible to you then I afraid I'll like to avoid the projects which are visible to you: who knows what other facts of life are ignored in them?

It's as ridiculous as "we don't know any Windows" attitude: it's Ok to not support Windows, but it's NOT OK to pretend it does not exist when 90% of world is still using it...

Subversion considers its future

Posted May 2, 2008 14:18 UTC (Fri) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]

 Fedora has just over 10k projects total, last I looked Debian was a little shy of 2x Fedora
... so implying that all those "100K+ projects" are created equal is "interesting".
 Almost everything I've looked at or worked on in the past two years has been git or hg, the
two notable exceptions being glibc (which as I said in my previous comment has a de-facto std.
public git repo.) and the NSAs hosted SELinux tree (shocker, govt. being behind the times).
 And if you look at the work on packaging in the Linux distributions all of the new-ish work
just assumes git/hg, for instance Gitsrc in debian.

 But yes, before you have a seizure, I guess there probably are some older projects that
haven't moved to git/hg/bzr yet (and maybe even don't have a public de-facto std. git repo)
... for one reason or another. How many of the developers consider that a "good" thing though,
and not just a legacy that noone has fixed yet?

 Maybe it would have made you happier if I'd said "Creating your source in" instead of "Having
your source in" ... but, meh, I stand by the main point which is that SVN _lost_ any mindshare
lead it had about 2 years ago. And any SVN developers who say that'll "eventually" happen are
just deluding themselves.