> Let me tell you something. Of all the time I have ever used DVCSes, over the last twenty years if we count Smalltalk changesets and twelve or so if you don’t, I have wanted to have the full history while offline a grand total of maybe about six times. And this is merely going down over time as bandwidth gets ever more readily available. If you work as a field tech, or on a space station, or in a submarine or something, then okay, sure, this is a huge feature for you.

Or if you're a Kiln customer, and their site is taking 4 minutes to load a page, assuming it's not just down...

Sorry, couldn't resist...

Seriously, though, I don't see where the author is going with his rant. It doesn't say much, and almost seems like a snide jab at Git and GitHub.

None of his points are very good. Yeah, it doesn't take a DVCS to treat the whole repo as a unit. But right now they're the only ones who do. A hypothetical patch to SVN doesn't help me much.

Also, I know from experience that SVN is horrible at binary files, and especially horrible at large binary files. I'm not saying Git and Mercurial are great, but they're no worse than SVN.

The entire section about the amount of books and documentation is just silly. There was a LOT more subversion info around than "just the Red book". I owned two books, and I know we had a few different ones floating around the office, not to mention boatloads of tutorials and guides online.

It's also funny how he makes fun of GitHub's git tutorial, but doesn't mention Kiln's Mercurial and Git tutorials. He also rips on GitHub's pull requests, but fails to mention that they work better than Kiln's.

But it's great to see the founder of Kiln telling everybody not to use the technology his company is based on...