Subversions Relevance [LWN.net]

Subversions Relevance

Posted Jan 15, 2009 8:58 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355)
In reply to: GNOME considers DVCS choices by rrdharan
Parent article: GNOME considers DVCS choices

It had been noted at the time when subversion came out that it was
just a stop gap measure. Essentially Subversion is CVS with some of
it's more glaring rough edges polished. As recently as last year I'd
been arguing that considering SVN as a migration from CVS was a
pointless exercise. In the end I just gave up, mirrored the CVS
repository with a few scripts to import into git and did my
development in git and exported when I needed to.

One thing SVN does have going for it though is the git import tools
for it are more stable than the CVS ones. If a project I'm interested
in hacking is still on SVN and doesn't already have a git repo
associated (most projects usually have at least one git fan already)
then I git-svn import it myself. I'd rather leave it to the core
developer/release teams to decide by themselves what they want to do
than adding my own 2p with a "Please considering migrating to..."
message.

Distributed VCS are the future. Personally I'm a fan of git but there is
scope for many different tools out there. Pretty much all of the open
source options have a good selection of import/export facilities that
allow non-core developers to use whatever their pet favourite DVCS is
to marshal their upstream patches. I'm hopeful that because of this
VC migration will be less of the barrier that it has been between the CVCS
and DVCS generations.

Obviously anyone considering a proprietary non-DVCS system to store
their open or closed source code in these days needs their heads
examining ;-)

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Subversions Relevance

Posted Jan 19, 2009 21:22 UTC (Mon) by henning (subscriber, #13406) [Link]

I don't think that SVN was only a stop gap measure. Its way more better then CVS, its just works and its easy to use. Git its much more powerful, but it makes also easier to shot yourself in the foot. If you want to work with peoples that only develop in their spare time then svn helps to lower the barrier to participate. And If you need to motivate other developers to use a RCS effectivly in their daily routine, then you also don't want to make their life harder then necessary.

And as already noted in the comments, most projects (e.g. inhouse, only a few developers) don't need a DVCS. I don't consider the projects i work ATM as backwards, only because "we still use SVN". IMHO the quality of a project has nothing really to do with the flavour of RCS they use.

SVN 1.0 (released in febr. 2004) was more or less a better CVS. But the svn developers don't stopped there, 1.5.x has e.g. now a much more advanced merge tracking, they improved the repository disk layout, added changeset tagging and much more things.

Shooting in the foot

Posted Jan 20, 2009 8:31 UTC (Tue) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

GIT is actually fairly safe to use. You have to work quite hard to
exorcise history from the repository although granted most users don't
seem to be aware of the power of the reflog.

My point about ease of access for non core developers basically covers
anyone who wants to do a non trivial patch and not keep a whole diff
hanging around in uncomitted changes in their local copy of an SVN reo.