Bram Cohen on great programmers

bramcohen.livejournal.com

55 points·lackbeard··7 comments

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Dec. 19th, 2004

Perhaps it's just me, but I find his more recent stuff a lot more interesting (especially the puzzles).

> Another one is building one's protocol as a layer on top of webdav.

Sorry for being a noob, but where does this come from and why is it bad?

If you ever used/administered Subversion, it will help you understand.

Hehehe, I do use and administer a Subversion server, but to me the webdav choice was ugly.

Standalone svn:// server for the win.

Or svn+ssh://

I always use svn+ssh. I had it under HTTPS initially (first using Apache, then Lighttpd), but it had a strong tendency to corrupt the working copy. Like daily. So I had to go in and delete .wcprops after every substantive check-in, which got really old really fast.

No problems with svn+ssh; seems to work fine.

Webdav is really one of the really ugly design decisions of the Subversion project. WebDAV was initially promoted by Rational - if you closely study WebDAV, it is easy to notice similarities with Clearcase. Looks like it was a political choice that was made to appeal to the managers in the IT departments - "Oh, Firewalls are not a problem, If your browser works, then the SVN should work ... blah blah". To be fair though some of the top committers will freely confess to a dislike for WebDAV.

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