GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#151

Post by haileys » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 11:58 PM UTC

snickerbockers wrote: post #130

IgorPartola wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

i'm still angry at mozilla and google for deprecating that, being able to set up a simple anonymous FTP server and send normies a link to it that they can open in their browsers was really convenient. Now if I want to use FTP i have to explain to them that they have to copy it into the windows file explorer or download filezilla.

Why not an HTTP server with a directory index?

FTP is a pretty clunky protocol: it's round-trip heavy, not friendly to NAT on the client-side when you don't use PASV, not friendly to firewalls on the server-side when you do. I'm not sure what benefits there are to it these days.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#152

Post by csomar » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 12:07 AM UTC

Shank wrote: post #13

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…

To be honest, the timelines Github have gave here are very generous (1 year). Most companies (even big one) these days will shut-down in a short 30 days notice.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#153

Post by Jenk » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 12:14 AM UTC

maegul wrote: post #148

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…

I recall needing/wanting to clone only a specific folder from a repo and the best solution being to use SVN. I'm pretty sure I used that trick a few times and even shared it a couple of times. Don't know if it's possible with git now, but that was how I discovered this feature and it seemed eminently useful to me at the time!

That's called a "sparse checkout" in git-land.

https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-sparse-checkout

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#154

Post by xerxesaa » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 12:15 AM UTC

In the many years I've used github, I honestly never even realized they supported svn.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#155

Post by joshu » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 12:18 AM UTC

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…

This is the right way to do April Fool's.

Similarly, I added support to del.icio.us for color: urls for april fool's. It worked, correctly, everywhere.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#156

Post by johnwalkr » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 12:20 AM UTC

dave78 wrote: post #95

histriosum wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Similarly, we used to use SVN for a mechanical engineering team doing CAD models. SVN supported a reserved checkout mode (I guess SVN calls it "locking") which meant only 1 person could check out a file at a time. Perfect for non-mergeable binary files, and with TortoiseSVN it was easy for non-SW engineers to use. That's one thing I doubt Git will ever be able to do since it is a distributed model rather than server-…

It does? That’s a requirement for version control for cad I think (just wrote a huge comment yesterday in here about it). I might actually try to use svn in 2023.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#157

Post by sakopov » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 12:21 AM UTC

rr808 wrote: post #11

How about Visual SourceSafe? I actually loved that for a small team.

I remembering checking in PDF templates into that thing and then never being able to open them ever again because VSS just randomly corrupted files.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#158

Post by Jenk » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 12:23 AM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #31

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…

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

Amazon's Dash had the most prominent response, imo.

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#159

Post by edgyquant » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 12:26 AM UTC

vtbassmatt wrote: post #101

eterm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. A few different SVN -> Git migration tools failed to migrate a large legacy repo at a previous employer. I thought I was doomed to be stuck on subversion forever. It was GitHub's migration that finally worked and got us migrated across. Funny we were only svn because I had previously been part of an effort to migrate them to svn when I'd joined a few years prior because before that they were using an old T…

FWIW we aren't planning to turn off Subversion import [1]. Only the two-way bridge where you could keep using `svn` against the Git repo. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/importing-your-projec...

Is SVN just not used really? Why not continue supporting (or even adding more) alternative version control systems?

Re: GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support

#160

Post by Aeolun » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 12:36 AM UTC

neallindsay wrote: post #108

I remember when they added Subversion support; I thought it was hilarious. And it worked! This quote from the linked blog post made me raise my eyebrows though: > In 2010…it was not yet clear that distributed version control would eventually take over, and even less clear that Git would be the dominant system. I think it was actually extremely clear that Git would win. It had a guaranteed audience by virtue of hostin…

None of those except for the iPhone were obvious to me. And in hindsight I’m happy I only switched to Git and Node when they’d matured a bit.