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GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

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Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#61

Post by IceWreck »

benatkin wrote: post #47
czx4f4bd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just repeating "fauxpen source" doesn't mean anything to me. What actual change are you referring to?

Big overview: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ A couple points in time: Pylance, installed by default, won't open source. Microsoft keeps calling VSCode open source. https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/4 Same for .NET https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1537175065380495367

To add to the list, the c/c++ extensions, remote ssh, remote containers and intellicode are also closed source.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#62

Post by jaywalk »

kypro wrote: post #25

I'd love to hear from someone who's still using SVN professionally and can explain why they prefers it to Git. I used SVN very early in my career. I think the only good thing I can say about it is that it's easier to learn. It's quite easy to teach a junior dev how to use SVN. Git takes much longer to master.

I still use SVN professionally, but new projects use git.

When you've got a ton of projects and their associated deployment pipelines all using SVN, the cost of migrating is non-zero. Someday I'll probably start (slowly) migrating, but the benefits just aren't great enough to make it a priority.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#63

Post by msbarnett »

avereveard wrote: post #26
jldugger wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SVN is a relatively sane option, especially before git was published. But in 2023 its mostly been replaced.

SVN had a great feature set, and a great way to handle merges, and sane defaults. too bad they hit some limits as repos become larger and larger, tried to implement a new storage engine, and basically they never managed to iron out all bugs out of it in time, while the older storage engine entered feature freeze and was basically abandoned. I've been checking them for years, and there were file corruption issue for s…

> SVN had a great feature set, and a great way to handle merges, and sane defaults.

Are you kidding? Subversion had a notoriously awful way of handling merges, which was a huge driver of people onto Git as soon as it appeared. You truly had to have been there to believe it, but in all but the simplest of merge scenarios, declaring branch bankruptcy and manually moving things back into the target branch by hand was your only real option. Early to mid 2000s, the most common team branching strategy I saw with subversion was "there's only one branch and everybody does all the development in it because god help you if you try to put it back together after branching for something".

It wasn't until well after the momentum was clearly in Git's favour and a huge chunk of the user base was gone that Subversion finally fixed it to not be complete dogshit.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#64

Post by magicalhippo »

kypro wrote: post #25

I'd love to hear from someone who's still using SVN professionally and can explain why they prefers it to Git. I used SVN very early in my career. I think the only good thing I can say about it is that it's easier to learn. It's quite easy to teach a junior dev how to use SVN. Git takes much longer to master.

We use SVN still. I'd like to switch to Git soon, given tooling like CI/CD is better/more available with Git, but apart from that it works.

That said, SVN works, and I do think the learning issue is the primary obstacle for us moving to Git.

It should be said we're a small team though, 10 devs. I can imagine Git looking a lot more attractive to a larger team.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#65

Post by IgorPartola »

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.

Instead add FTP version control support with the ability to create backup files.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#66

Post by sofixa »

histriosum wrote: post #55
kypro wrote: post #25

I'd love to hear from someone who's still using SVN professionally and can explain why they prefers it to Git. I used SVN very early in my career. I think the only good thing I can say about it is that it's easier to learn. It's quite easy to teach a junior dev how to use SVN. Git takes much longer to master.

I use Subversion at my gig in several places. I don't use it to manage source code revision control, but I have several processes that require business users to manage binary files (such as audio files) in order for them to be automatically deployed to production. Git or Mercurial are pretty awful at this kind of role. Subversion let's me check out at a subfolder level of a repository, and not pay the cost of having…

Git is much better at it nowadays thanks to Git LFS which just stores the blobs.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#67

Post by woodruffw »

Only partially related, but since they mention it at the bottom of the post: I really like GH's "brownout" approach to discontinuing services. They've done it a couple of times before (like this one[1]), and it's always struck me as a very sensible way to handle deprecations on such a massive service.

[1]: https://github.blog/changelog/2021-08-10-brownout-notice-api...

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#68

Post by avgcorrection »

thaeli wrote: post #21

The one thing I really miss about svn is the central,authoritative, auto-incrementing revision numbers. Git hashes are less friendly to use - in the svn days it was easy to tell at a glance if you had an earlier or later version. Yes, I know the many ways that git is better in practice, and would miss some of the workflows git's nature allows if they were gone. But we really did lose something too, especially when ru…

Maybe you can count the first parent commits on mainline, and then reverse that list.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#69

Post by coldpie »

somerando7 wrote: post #41
kypro wrote: post #25

I'd love to hear from someone who's still using SVN professionally and can explain why they prefers it to Git. I used SVN very early in my career. I think the only good thing I can say about it is that it's easier to learn. It's quite easy to teach a junior dev how to use SVN. Git takes much longer to master.

What's better about git? I haven't used svn, but have used perforce/mercurial professionally/git professionally, and use git personally, but I find all of them to provide the same "feature set" when doing basic development: have your own branch, and merge it in to the main branch when done/reviewed. Merging seems the same on all 3 version control systems I've used... I've heard that git branching is better(?), but ha…

> I haven't used svn

Yeahhhh. Svn is centralized. You must be connected to the server to do any source control work. There is no local repository, there are no local commits. Every commit is global on the server. When you make a commit, it is pushed to the server and your coworkers can fetch it. You don't make commits locally and fiddle around and then push.

Also Svn doesn't have branches per se. You just use subdirectories. It does have facilities for merging directories and managing these "branches", but it feels real weird to be switching branches with 'cd'.

It's a very different world.

A quick read: https://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.tour.cycle.html

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#70

Post by RockRobotRock »

scrollaway wrote: post #59
ceejayoz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until nobody believed us. I remember having this problem with Gmail's "1GB for everyone!" April 1 announcement.

I think April 1st should definitely be "Crazy-but-real announcement day". It'll take some attention off the unfunnier-every-year "jokes" which have turned a pleasant and fun yearly occasion into the internet being unusable for ~36 hours.

You mean the internet being actually lighthearted and fun (like it used to be) for 36 hours?
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