Hacker News Reader

Comment by lambda_lord | Hacker News Reader

Git completely replaced Subversion so quickly because the benefits were apparent even at a small scale. Subversion was centralized and slow whereas Git branches were cheap and fast. It turns out the distributed model is just a lot better. Even my college project teams benefited from the superior experience of Git.

View on HN

Interestingly, there was a distributed SCM build on top of SVN, called SVK (https://wiki.c2.com/?SvkVersionControl).

Being distributed, it solved the main gripes with SVN; it also added a better merging algorithm (https://foswiki.org/pub/Development/SVK/svk-visual-guide.pdf), solving another big gripe.

I was actually satisfied of it, and surprised that it never got attention, in particular, because there were no requirements in order to use it with existing SVN repositories. I'm actually baffled, because SVN is still active, so SVK would still be useful nowadays.

May as well use Git SVN integration for this.

Except that everybody changed to Github not git. And effectively recreated Subversion with caching.

No, I worked with gitlab, bitbucket, custom git server installs in the last 3 years alone.

"Subversion with caching" is not subversion.

I used subversion for a long time and was resistant to moving ardour.org to use git instead. 24hours after we switched (we never use 3rd party git hosting as our canonical repo), I was already convinced it was not the right choice, but an excellent choice.

It's also Subversion where you can commit your changes and write the message before pushing, instead of at the same time, so you get the chance to review it. That's enough to make it better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com