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Why Subversion does not suck
blog.assembla.com
In a world without Subversion, Subversion would be built out of Git. In a world without Git, Monotone, Darcs etc. ... well that's where we were 5 years ago, and it sucked.
Maybe git is better... maybe it doesn't matter enough to bother changing. But you have to admit these types of things are more about what is "in fashion" than what is better suited to a particular task.
Things go in big cycles. For a few years centralization is excellent, offers massive benefits, then suddenly distributed is excellent offers massive benefits etc etc As the post hinted, I wouldn't be surprised if 5 years from now git is pronounced as a terrible idea, and the trend setters go back to something more like svn.
In a world without Subversion, Subversion would be built out of Git. In a world without Git, Monotone, Darcs etc. ... well that's where we were 5 years ago, and it sucked.
Did it really suck? I was using subversion in a team of around 15, 5 years ago, and all in all it worked pretty well. It was rare that there would be any issue or that subversion got in the way. Maybe git is better... maybe it doesn't matter enough to bother changing. But you have to admit these types of things are more about what is "in fashion" than what is better suited to a particular task. Things go in big cycle…
Some people and some projects prefer centralized. That's fine. But you can't build a distributed version control system out of a centralized one.
Why does everyone assume that designers are stupid luddites who can't wrap their heads around complex systems? UI design is full of nuance and complexity. It's insulting to designers to assume they cannot deal with DVCS.
"Even designers can use it." Why does everyone assume that designers are stupid luddites who can't wrap their heads around complex systems? UI design is full of nuance and complexity. It's insulting to designers to assume they cannot deal with DVCS.
Designers are often helpful for a reality check. People should listen to them more!
(There is also nothing about DCVSs that necessitates a bad UI, of course.)
The popular notion isn't that Subversion sucks, but that it's pointless. The claim I hear is that it's a reinvention of cvs, but it doesn't actually improve much. Personally, I had to learn cvs, it's simple enough for my needs, and I see no reason to switch to something that's fundamentally the same thing.
I think most cvs users are in a similar situation as me. We know Subversion is better, but those benefits seem marginal and not worth the effort to switch.
"Even designers can use it." Why does everyone assume that designers are stupid luddites who can't wrap their heads around complex systems? UI design is full of nuance and complexity. It's insulting to designers to assume they cannot deal with DVCS.
Meanwhile: To claim that SVN is intrinsically easier to understand than DVCS is to be very shortsighted. Subversion is a more mature technology: It's eight years old, and is conceptually based on CVS, which goes back to the eighties. DVCS is all of eleven years old in its eldest incarnation (according to Wikipedia) and the current generation of tools (git, Bazaar, Mercurial) date back only to 2005.
DVCS is a maturing technology. One of the things that happens as a technology matures is that people learn better ways to explain it to new users, build better interfaces, build better infrastructure.
If you don't think that DVCS makes enough sense to non-geeks yet... give it time.
"Even designers can use it." Why does everyone assume that designers are stupid luddites who can't wrap their heads around complex systems? UI design is full of nuance and complexity. It's insulting to designers to assume they cannot deal with DVCS.
Whenever someone says "even X can use it" about some technology, it usually means that either X is stupid, or X is very busy and has no time to waste on "yet another Y".
That said, git can be used in a perfectly centralized fashion, just like SVN. (I use it for automatic synchornization of all my files across 3 laptops via central NAS). And there are some cool GUIs popping up.
"Even designers can use it." Why does everyone assume that designers are stupid luddites who can't wrap their heads around complex systems? UI design is full of nuance and complexity. It's insulting to designers to assume they cannot deal with DVCS.
Amen. Meanwhile: To claim that SVN is intrinsically easier to understand than DVCS is to be very shortsighted. Subversion is a more mature technology: It's eight years old, and is conceptually based on CVS, which goes back to the eighties. DVCS is all of eleven years old in its eldest incarnation (according to Wikipedia) and the current generation of tools (git, Bazaar, Mercurial) date back only to 2005. DVCS is a ma…
There's no reason a DCVS can't have a clean, easily usable interface (darcs's is better than git's, for example), but the git developers have focused on features and raw power over usability.