Subversion: Is the jump from CVS worth it? [LWN.net]

Subversion: Is the jump from CVS worth it?

Posted Mar 19, 2004 16:00 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
In reply to: Subversion: Is the jump from CVS worth it? by jonth
Parent article: Subversion: Is the jump from CVS worth it?

One observation: You sound more like a fanboy than the author.

The author clearly had a focus, also expressed in the headline: to report from his migration from CVS to Subversion. His last sentence about "Subversion will be the future dominant revision control system" can be seen in two different ways: Either it expresses his enthusiasm, or it reflects his realism on the non-technical issues concerning tool selection by the OSS community (read Richard Gabriel's famous "Worse is Better" essay to learn what I mean).

Frankly, your name calling is also not appropriate. Calling all people who use centralized CMM systems dumb (with the exception of Greg Hudson) is by no means professional. I'm following CM systems closely, both in research and practice, since 1984. (Actually, your dialogue style reminds me at the atmosphere at the 1st International ACM Workshop on Software Version and Configuration Control, at Grassau (Austria). Lot's of people there who thought they have found the holy grail with changeset-based CM, too.)

I have worked both with centralized and decentralized systems, with revision and changeset approaches, with proprietary and commercial systems. Believe me, the world is not as black and white as you want to make it seen. There are very sound reasons for many CM versions, including arch, Subversion, and CVS [sic!]. It depends on feature points, maturity, type of support expected, how many legacy projects are around, familiarity, etc.

Regards, Joachim

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Subversion: Is the jump from CVS worth it?

Posted Mar 19, 2004 17:27 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

Joachim: I think you might be confusing me ("Zooko") with another poster ("Jonth").

I'm sorry if my dialogue style angered you. I didn't intend to say that all other people who prefer centralized revision control systems are dumb -- I intended to say that until recently (Greg Hudson's articles) I hadn't seen any writing which was both cognizant of decentralized revision control and also argued that centralized revision control was better for some uses. Instead I had seem quite a lot of advocacy for decentralized systems which evinced knowledge of centralized systems, and I had seen quite a lot of advocacy for Subversion which evinced no awareness of decentralized systems.

I'm sure that this says more about my limited exposure to the ideas than it says about the intelligence of the users of centralized revision control systems.

But unfortunately the current lwn article, to which I was responding, is another example of someone who does not seem to be aware of the decentralized alternative, and is advocating Subversion.

Subversion: Is the jump from CVS worth it?

Posted Mar 19, 2004 17:30 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

By the way, I quite agree with your comments about the suitability of different tools in different situations, and I am interested to hear about the history of the idea of changesets in revision control.