Applauding SVN [LWN.net]

Applauding SVN

Posted Apr 5, 2010 18:09 UTC (Mon) by arjan (subscriber, #36785)
Parent article: A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap

I'm seeing a lot of people that like git here sort of blasting SVN in this
discussion.

I have to applaud the SVN guys to have the strength to make the decision to
not play in the DVCS game. I think it's a strength to realize and admit that
you can't play somewhere, not a weakness. SVN will never compete with git in
DVCS, and they know it, and are very open about it.

SVN has its place, even if it's not the place us git lovers will play in.
Realizing that, as a project, and servicing that place rather than trying to
win over the other guys who'll never like it anyway deserves applause not
flamage.

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Applauding SVN

Posted Apr 5, 2010 19:06 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Also, svn has one huge advantage: it reignited popular work on VCSes.
Remember what things were like before Subversion? You could use CVS, or if
you really wanted to drive your developers insane you could use arch.

Now? *How* many possibilities have we got, again? Yes, most of these
ultimately derived from arch or bitkeeper or something else distributed,
but I'll bet that the impetus to work on version control at all ultimately
came from the fact that, well, people *worked* on subversion, it's *not*
as hard as everyone has made out, and it doesn't need to be terribly
boring after all, and CVS et al has all these annoying wrinkles which SVN
hasn't quite squashed...

Applauding SVN

Posted Apr 6, 2010 21:28 UTC (Tue) by etrusco (guest, #4227) [Link]

> Remember what things were like before Subversion?
> You could use CVS, or if you really wanted to drive
> your developers insane you could use arch.

Just because cvsnt (cvsnt.org) was poorly named and thus not well known...

Applauding SVN

Posted Apr 6, 2010 22:37 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I completely forgot about it. (Also, TBH, the name confused me as well
into thinking it was just a CVS port to NT. They souped it up, but I'm not
sure how much.)

Applauding SVN

Posted Apr 5, 2010 21:11 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Let me clarify: I am not blasting SVN or the SVN development team or their goals. I think that SVN is a fine piece of software that has its place.

What I am blasting is the wording of the first paragraph of the "VISION" section, which (IMO) implies that all other VCS systems lack the "centralization, control, meaningful path-based authorization, and simplicity" that SVN supposedly offers. That is simply untrue.

Applauding SVN

Posted Apr 10, 2010 2:31 UTC (Sat) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link]

Re-read what was said. There are a class of users that need centralization and control, that's who SVN is targeting. They simply aren't going to make it a DVCS and they said that there is a class of users that don't want that..