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Comment by btucker | Hacker News Reader

As someone who got started in this field about 10 years ago, I find the mass-adoption of and then mass-exodus from subversion fascinating. I remember sitting in the audience for a talk by Greg Stein introducing subversion at ApacheCon ('02 maybe) and being wow'ed.

I'm trying to think if there's another piece of architecture our industry has both so universally embraced & discarded (hyperbole, I know) in the last decade.

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It's because 10 years ago there weren't really any distributed version control systems, and the original aim of Subversion was to fix everything that was horribly broken in CVS. They definitely succeded with that design goal, but since they're stuck in a centralized design, there's nothing they can do to move it to a distributed model, and it's not something that could have been foreseen 10 years ago.

They're simply the last technology before a paradigm shift, and that's never a good position to be in.

I think that's the best position (in case of svn) to be in.

Subversion is, imho, the best of centralized scm-s. There are many companies that, for some reason or other, will not switch to dvcs. It really doesn't matter that distributed model is better than centralized, some people will not switch over. And svn is great choice for them.

I agree that's what happened. But I'm still trying to think of whether there are any other cases of this in the last decade. There certainly have been other paradigm shifts. Yet i'm having a hard time thinking of anything which both gained significant prominence and then was left behind. Maybe OpenID?

I have friends still who use CVS (and don't see why it's so bad). In fact, we still have CVS repos around. Change is slooow.

The plans Subversion developers had were very promising; but the implementation wasn't that good and some non-obvious but handy features were missed. The enchanted users flocked to Subversion in hopes of it improving over time. The disillusioned users jump the ship once they learn of better alternatives.

Embraced and discarded? With a little hyperbole, and two decades of time scale, that's Win32. Startups used to do Win32 programs by default, now it's web. Of course big, hulkin' companies still do...

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