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Why Subversion does not suck

blog.assembla.com

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Re: Why Subversion does not suck

#21

Post by silentbicycle »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #18
silentbicycle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calm down. :) I never said that subversion's interface is great(?!), I just said that designers often find some tools programmers use ridiculously ugly and unnecessarily complicated. I think they have a valid point, and when programmers write them off, they often lose valuable feedback. (If a relatively simple tool is as annoying to configure as procmail, for example, somebody screwed up badly. IMHO.) I use Mercurial…

designers often find some tools programmers use ridiculously ugly and unnecessarily complicated Yeah, that must be why so many of them use no version control at all... I agree that the VCS to use is the one that your designer is willing to use. I just think that there's no reason why designers should necessarily want to use Subversion over a DVCS... except that, as a more mature tool, Subversion has a better selectio…

"I think we are in violent agreement." (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ViolentAgreement)

Re: Why Subversion does not suck

#22

Post by mtoledo »

Curious, we use assembla on our team and our designer uses git (assembla's git) without any problems.

It's great if people want to have the choice for subversion, tho. Some people just prefer the tools they are used to instead of learning new, more powerful ones. But to use that as argument that svn doesn't suck is not a very strong point.

Re: Why Subversion does not suck

#23

Post by axod »

gcv wrote: post #20
axod wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm very happy that Subversion works for you. For me, it just blew up on an update, which corrupted the fragile .svn directories it litters all over the working copy. "svn cleanup" couldn't repair the damage. This sort of thing happens on a regular basis. Git, on the other hand? No problems.

"This sort of thing happens on a regular basis."

Seriously? I don't remember ever seeing that, perhaps it's restricted to a certain O/S or version.

Re: Why Subversion does not suck

#24

Post by mtoledo »

mtoledo wrote: post #22

Curious, we use assembla on our team and our designer uses git (assembla's git) without any problems. It's great if people want to have the choice for subversion, tho. Some people just prefer the tools they are used to instead of learning new, more powerful ones. But to use that as argument that svn doesn't suck is not a very strong point.

Though, when I showed him the article, he agreed with it.. so maybe he's right. :-D

Re: Why Subversion does not suck

#25

Post by mhartl »

Branching and merging suck in Subversion. Offline commits suck in Subversion. Does that mean Subversion sucks? Depends on whether you want good branching and merging and offline commits. I do; therefore, for me, Subversion sucks. QED.

Re: Why Subversion does not suck

#26

Post by scott_s »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #8
moonpolysoft wrote: post #5

"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…

I understand your point about maturing technology, but distributed anything is usually hard for people to wrap their heads around the first time.

Re: Why Subversion does not suck

#27

Post by kragen »

tome wrote: post #4
axod wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sucked because we didn't have the possibility of distributed version control, even if we really wanted it. 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.

svk? Also BitKeeper was built on SCCS, and ClearCase MultiSite was built on ClearCase.

Re: Why Subversion does not suck

#28

Post by thwarted »

old-gregg wrote: post #9
moonpolysoft wrote: post #5

"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.

Because designers, unlike programmers, have much higher standards for tools. They don't jump on a new "ground-breaking" toy every 2 months, just because someone famous had said "this is THE shit - use it". 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 ce…

I'm not sure this generalization applies to even a significant portion of either designers or programmers. As a human who uses tools, I want my tools to be reliable first and foremost, but since 100% reliable is a fantasy, it is always wise to be both on the look out for more reliable tools _and_ to know the tools you to use constantly intimately, inside and out, so you are more productive and less surprised by gotchas that the tools have. A tool that fails unpredictably or in a way that can't be fixed is a useless tool. You must know the limitations of your tools, to not know the limitations is to be unable to recognize when something better comes along. Not exploring new options and not being well versed with your current tools, or just doing one or the other, is wearing blinders.
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