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GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

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Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#12

Post by schacon »

As one of the GitHub cofounders and the brainchild of this particular feature, I want to let everyone know that this is maybe the funniest thing I've ever done.

We released this feature and published the announcing blog post, on April Fool's Day, 2010. I remember demoing it to the other GitHub guys and saying how funny it would be if we made this an April Fool's day post as though it was a big stupid joke but then it actually completely worked on every repository we had and we all thought it would be great. Until nobody believed us. Which in hindsight we should have seen coming, since that was the joke, but nobody actually tried it. Then people tried it and it worked and they thought it was a trick or something.

It was really helpful for people migrating from legacy SVN based systems to us (CI and stuff) but I'm surprised to some degree that it's still running 13 years later when nobody is really facing that issue anymore. And I'm still undecided if the joke was worth the massive confusion it caused. But if I'm pressed, I would say that I would 100% release it on April Fool's Day again.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#13

Post by Shank »

This reminds me of when Slack shutdown its IRC bridge [0], and in a pretty negative way. I get that usage is down, but that tends to happen. Supporting niche users is how you win customer goodwill. The active users of SVN on GitHub clearly aren't going to switch to git, and I can respect the maintenance costs, but they're probably just going to switch to a different provider. For them, their workflow is now in-danger and they have to solve that problem in-addition to whatever they're working on. I always thought it was a lovely little feature GitHub supported, and I'm sad to see it go for this reason.

[0]: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/03/08/2049255/slack-is-shut...

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#14

Post by nighthawk454 »

CJefferson wrote: post #10

There is only one thing about subversion I miss when using git -- the deletion of branches (which were, admittedly, just directories in a folder called branches) was version controlled, so you could recover deleted branches.

Just in case - you can in git as well. Branches are just pointers to a commit SHA, so can always create another pointer to the same commit and your branch is back.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3640764/can-i-recover-a-...

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#15

Post by benatkin »

GitHub hasn't heard of Docker? It seems they could use it to run Subversion without any effect on their git hosting.

Just kidding, but remember back in the DotCloud days when they pointed out you could run Perl? That was pretty cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2518526

> In 2010, when GitHub introduced Subversion support, the version control landscape was very different.

That was waaaaay before Microsoft acquired it.

> But hey, if the Subversion system just works and doesn’t bother anyone, there’s no reason to make any changes, right? The reality is that there’s an ongoing maintenance cost to any software, and that goes extra for public-facing services on the internet. As the use of GitHub has evolved and the number of Subversion requests has declined dramatically, we plan to focus our efforts entirely on Git.

Reminds me of how Microsoft dumped Atom (and then fauxpen-sourced VSCode before dumping the last remnants of Atom).

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#16

Post by vtbassmatt »

schacon wrote: post #12

As one of the GitHub cofounders and the brainchild of this particular feature, I want to let everyone know that this is maybe the funniest thing I've ever done. We released this feature and published the announcing blog post, on April Fool's Day, 2010. I remember demoing it to the other GitHub guys and saying how funny it would be if we made this an April Fool's day post as though it was a big stupid joke but then it…

As the PM who ended up finally killing it, I (on behalf of the team) thank you for your "joke" that wasn't really a joke. It did help some customers who had legacy SVN workloads land on GitHub.

I wanted to announce this on April Fool's Day, but just couldn't make the timing work.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#18

Post by stouset »

nighthawk454 wrote: post #14
CJefferson wrote: post #10

There is only one thing about subversion I miss when using git -- the deletion of branches (which were, admittedly, just directories in a folder called branches) was version controlled, so you could recover deleted branches.

Just in case - you can in git as well. Branches are just pointers to a commit SHA, so can always create another pointer to the same commit and your branch is back. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3640764/can-i-recover-a-...

I suspect GP knows this, but there's no way to go back and see what the branch ref was at a prior point in time. I believe they wish that refs themselves were versioned.

And yes, I know they're kept in the reflog. But that is short-lived and (I believe) local rather than eternal and global like everything else in git.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#20

Post by schacon »

vtbassmatt wrote: post #16
schacon wrote: post #12

As one of the GitHub cofounders and the brainchild of this particular feature, I want to let everyone know that this is maybe the funniest thing I've ever done. We released this feature and published the announcing blog post, on April Fool's Day, 2010. I remember demoing it to the other GitHub guys and saying how funny it would be if we made this an April Fool's day post as though it was a big stupid joke but then it…

As the PM who ended up finally killing it, I (on behalf of the team) thank you for your "joke" that wasn't really a joke. It did help some customers who had legacy SVN workloads land on GitHub. I wanted to announce this on April Fool's Day, but just couldn't make the timing work.

I tip my hat to your team and I owe you all beers, my friends. You are doing the lord's work.
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