Subversion moving to the Apache Software Foundation | Hacker News Reader

Subversion moving to the Apache Software Foundation

blog.red-bean.com

33 pointsMaysonL17 comments

Reading so many Project X moves to Git blogs in the past year I read "Subversion moving" and mentally though Git and then pondered why Subversion would not use Subversion :)

Anyway congrats on this mature piece of software having somewhere to go live for all of the users who still use it.

"Even though I’ve become a Mercurial user myself, I can assure you that these other products aren’t going away anytime soon!"

Correct me if I am wrong but the author of the blog was a main Subversion dev right?

"I’ve long stopped working on Subversion code, but I wanted to make sure the project was parked in a good place before I could really walk away guilt-free."

Slowly ASF is eating or creating my entire development environment. If they consumed Eclipse and OpenJDK it'd be pretty much 100%.

Edit: Which is not a bad thing. Just observation.

The ASF has a Java implementation: Harmony. I think Android uses some of it.

Serious question: do people still use Subversion? Everyone I know has moved to some kind of DVCS, with Git being the clear frontrunner. Are there large, dark pockets of Subversion users still out there?

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but I'll assume it's an innocent question: Yes, there are huge numbers of people still using SVN.

SVN is a mature, easy, and simple solution. Git is wonderful, but all the improvements it brings aren't enough to actually convince IT departments to upgrade years of SVN over to Git (or to bother installing the Git-SVN bridge).

SVN gets the job done. With teams of under 10 developers on each project, SVN just works. There isn't a real bleeding need for Git's featureset, and especially if you've never used them, you probably don't know what you're missing out on. But the truth is, the answer to that is not much.

I know and have personally upgraded companies from SourceSafe to SVN..... after DVCS caught on. Sometimes the simpler solution is the safer bet, drastic change isn't always the answer and is never good for productivity, especially against a deadline as most companies and dev teams seem to be doing these days.

For myself, as a one-man dev team on projects with multiple simultaneous branches and 100k+ LOC and dozens of modules cross-linked and cross-developed......... SVN still gets the job done :)

Git is a blub. Compared to nothing svn is awesome! It is more then just the distributed nature. There are so many features that Git brings over older revision control systems that if I was forced to use an old one (and not allowed to use git-svn or something) I would change jobs. I can simply be way more productive with Git.

I agree. And for me, the awesomeness didn't really sink in from reading the documentation. I had to actually use it to be won over. Whereas, if you've used CVS, SVN is a breath of fresh air, but it just doesn't blow you away.

This is provocative comment. I use svn every day. It seems to meet all my needs. I find it logical, fast enough, tags, branches, and merging make sense, etc. When I started hearing about git, I looked at the docs and a couple of tutorials, and my conclusion was that it was esoteric. Nothing stood out as "wow that would be really cool" or "wow that's something I have wished I could do but svn doesn't let me". If it's "fast" that's nice, but not enough of a reason for me to switch; I don't feel like my productivity is really hampered very much waiting for svn operations. So, I never actually tried using git.

But, your remarks have intrigued me, so I might give it a try on a couple of personal projects I want to get done.

The awesomeness starts from git init; git add . (or in my case, hg init; hg add). Even if you don't use anything else, this is a big improvement over Subversion.

Subversion is a blub

FTFY.

(The pg article that coined "Blub" (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) uses it as the name of a middle of the road language between machine language on the low end of the power scale and Lisp on the high end. So Blub is to Lisp as SVN is to Git.)

> But the truth is, the answer to that is not much.

This claim may sound like truthful only if one never used git indeed.

EDIT: I think I should expand this. There is what I would miss if git is taken away from me, in no particular order:

Speed, speed, speed. Operations which SVN performs over network (and not in the most efficient way) git performs locally and it's blazingly fast.

Ease of branching and merging.

Local branches, squash commits.

Rebase.

Staging area.

Stash.

Having entire history at my fingertips and not having single point of failure which SVN central server is. The fact that entire history in git often takes less space than single checkout of SVN is a nice bonus.

Not having each and every directory of my project littered with .svn

Github.

There is more, of course.

I was kind of Subversion fan when I first saw Linus talk on git (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 ) and I did not like it at all. Then I did try git and saw the light :) I am still using SVN, but only because I have to. Now it looks dated (mature?), slow, clunky and fragile.

If you go to stackoverflow, you'll see tons of people actively recommending new projects start using subversion for various reasons.

I have a skewed view of the world, I believe. I use the tools that solve my problems the best and don't care too much what the "general" opinion of them are. Much of the world sees stuff like this:

http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/dec/26/stack-ove...

Definitely. Projects that predate git and don't absolutely need dvcs will probably stay in subversion for the rest of their natural lifetimes.

Plus tools like Joey Hess's mr make working in a heterogeneous vcs environment somewhat manageable.

A better question might be: why does anyone still use cvs?

As soon as my coworkers (managers and software engineers alike) can use Git without typing anything on the command line (a la TortoiseSVN) then we will consider switching. Until then, there's just no reason to incur the overhead of the switch.

Convince me of the benefits.

We develop for Windows and I haven't yet seen a compelling implementation of any DVCS that brings the speed and experience that would be expected (yes, we also use TortoiseSVN) as well as the integration into the tools we use (CruiseControl .Net, Target Process).

I'm happy to consider something else, but we have something that works and works well. We've had no issues with Subversion and the support for it in other tools is phenomenal.

We also bring in contractors occasionally, and it's great to know that they will be instantly comfortable with Subversion, the same is not true of DVCS yet.

I'm sure we can fulfil the basic working requirements fine with DVCS, but I can't see much in the way of benefits for moving away from a working solution with wide support to something else... especially when in the Windows world it would greatly reduce the experience the developers and contractors have.

In other news, COBOL is excited to announce its imminent move to the Apache Software Foundation.

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