Subversion considers its future [LWN.net]

Subversion considers its future

Posted May 2, 2008 9:15 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433)
In reply to: Subversion considers its future by dberlin
Parent article: Subversion considers its future

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?

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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...