The Future of Subversion

sciurus0 writes "As the open source version control system Subversion nears its 1.5 release, one of its developers asks, what is the project's future? On the one hand, the number of public Subversion DAV servers is still growing quadratically. On the other hand, open source developers are increasingly switching to distributed version control systems like Git and Mercurial. Is there still a need for centralized version control in some environments, or is Linus Torvalds right that all who use it are 'ugly and stupid'?" The comments on the blog post have high S/N.

S/N Ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

The comments on the blog post have high S/N.

And posting it here is really going to help!

SVN Sticking around?

[TofuMatt]

Git out of here.

Re:Well *I'm* ugly and stupid...

[try_anything]

I seriously do mind if you write it on your laptop on the beach, check it in to your local repository and then get your laptop stolen (or covered in margeritas).

And the Subversion user would presumably have... teleported himself to a wifi hotspot to check in his work?

Of course a CVS user only updates once a week and checks in once a month, so being on the beach for a few days wouldn't make any difference at all.

I have used Subversion, git, and most recently CVS, and the only big risks I've taken have been with CVS, where everything is so constrictive and painful that I tend to check in as little as possible. The bottom line is that whatever makes for the easiest, most natural development process will result in more frequent check-ins and less lost work.

(I've just stopped asking my colleagues, "How do I ___ in CVS?" because the answer is always slack-jawed silence, followed by, "Why would you want to do that?" accompanied with a suspicious squint-eyed stare that makes me feel like I'm in Deliverance, right there in a cube farm full of college-educated yuppies. CVS warps your brain to the point where you don't think there is ever any good reason to, say, rename a directory, and anyone who wants to rename a directory must be some kind of alien, possibly a marketer or a salesman who wandered into the wrong department, because a Real Programmer would never think up such a bizarre idea as renaming a directory to reflect its current contents. I mean, you pick a name, and it stays forever, right, like a street name! You don't go to Market Street and expect to find a market, so why are you surprised to find the networking code in the tpe_bckp directory? Gary Graybeard can tell you all about how it got that way, and it's a fascinating story. Think of all the rich history that would disappear if you renamed it the "net" or "networking" directory. So depressingly literal. And speaking of depressingly literal, the history would *literally disappear*, and the whole reason we have a SCM system is so we don't lose history. So don't go making changes that it doesn't know how to track, you hear?)