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It’s time to stop using Subversion

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Re: It’s time to stop using Subversion

#21

Post by dexen »

abyssknight wrote: post #7

How about, no? The day you realize the tools you use are not the most important part of your function is the day you finally understand what it is you do. Yes, tools can make things easier, run more smoothly, or make you happy but... Can you do the same, if not better, job with alternate, less efficient tools? Yes. Tool elitism is no better than language elitism. Now, I'll be in the corner using notepad and copying m…

You are mistaking the tools you use for the tools that a team can use. That's Git: it lets teammates communicate changes in a straightforward, consistent manner, with little overhead. With a tool suite to review, pull en mass or cherry-pick the changes at will; with the defaults being the most practical choices most of the time.

If you want your team to be more than a sum of the members (as opposed to stepping on each others' toes), you need decent communication tool.

Or you can dispose of communication by being a lone wolf.

Re: It’s time to stop using Subversion

#22

Post by mduerksen »

abyssknight wrote: post #7

How about, no? The day you realize the tools you use are not the most important part of your function is the day you finally understand what it is you do. Yes, tools can make things easier, run more smoothly, or make you happy but... Can you do the same, if not better, job with alternate, less efficient tools? Yes. Tool elitism is no better than language elitism. Now, I'll be in the corner using notepad and copying m…

> Can you do the same, if not better, job with alternate, less efficient tools?

The question is: Is a tool just 10% more efficient or does it introduce a whole new quality of working with it?

What do you do when your already delivered software has a bug that needs to be fixed urgently, but you already started to add new features that are not ready yet?

Using branches with svn is a thing just everyone is scared of (and rightly so), but with git, this has lost it's horror. You can confidently handle the above situation with git. That's a new quality.

Re: It’s time to stop using Subversion

#23

Post by dexen »

durin42 wrote: post #20
yuvadam wrote: post #11

Do not confuse elitism with minimalism. Git is simply easier to use, and harder to shoot yourself in the foot with - at least when it comes to the basic flows. (Granted, you can blow your face off with git if you really try hard). When branching in git is a simple git checkout -b newbranch away as opposed to svn copy http://repo.com/some/path/to/trunk http://repo.com/some/path/to/branches/somenewbranch - then what el…

> Git is simply easier to use, and harder to shoot yourself in the foot with - at least when it comes to the basic flows. (Granted, you can blow your face off with git if you really try hard). I don't know. I've trained a lot of developers with Subverison, Git, and Mercurial. Subversion is the one that I've honestly had the least trouble with, and Git the most. Heck, early on with git I had instances where the repo w…

Perhaps you want to re-read on git-reset. You can always rewind history to some arbitrary point and re-stack operations, both en-mass and step by step

You can re-write branches locally and even on the server. It's to be used very rarely & carefully, but it has gotten the other team at my workplace out of a tight spot just two days ago.

Re: It’s time to stop using Subversion

#24

Post by v21 »

btucker wrote: post #18

As someone who got started in this field about 10 years ago, I find the mass-adoption of and then mass-exodus from subversion fascinating. I remember sitting in the audience for a talk by Greg Stein introducing subversion at ApacheCon ('02 maybe) and being wow'ed. I'm trying to think if there's another piece of architecture our industry has both so universally embraced & discarded (hyperbole, I know) in the last deca…

I have friends still who use CVS (and don't see why it's so bad). In fact, we still have CVS repos around. Change is slooow.

Re: It’s time to stop using Subversion

#25

Post by dexen »

btucker wrote: post #18

As someone who got started in this field about 10 years ago, I find the mass-adoption of and then mass-exodus from subversion fascinating. I remember sitting in the audience for a talk by Greg Stein introducing subversion at ApacheCon ('02 maybe) and being wow'ed. I'm trying to think if there's another piece of architecture our industry has both so universally embraced & discarded (hyperbole, I know) in the last deca…

The plans Subversion developers had were very promising; but the implementation wasn't that good and some non-obvious but handy features were missed. The enchanted users flocked to Subversion in hopes of it improving over time. The disillusioned users jump the ship once they learn of better alternatives.

Embraced and discarded? With a little hyperbole, and two decades of time scale, that's Win32. Startups used to do Win32 programs by default, now it's web. Of course big, hulkin' companies still do...

Re: It’s time to stop using Subversion

#26

Post by Tomek_ »

pdenya wrote: post #10

Why do some devs not like CLIs? GUIs are nice sometimes but I definitely don't pick my tools based on which has the nicest. Also, it's not like SVN is suddenly bad or anything. I prefer GIT but I'm not tripping all over myself to switch over all of my existing projects.

CLIs are nice once you remember commands to use them and usually devs have more important things to do than to learn another set of commands.

Re: It’s time to stop using Subversion

#27

Post by Aegean »

selectnull wrote: post #17
CountHackulus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us are stuck using Clear Case or Visual Source Safe. Whatever source control you're using, someone always has it worse.

"someone always has it worse." Unfortunatelly, not in your case. ;)

What was the name of that version control tool before CVS, RVCS? Back in 2007 I had heard one very big name hardware company using that for version control and planning to move to CVS as they thought the former was beginning to show its age.

Re: It’s time to stop using Subversion

#28

Post by henrikschroder »

btucker wrote: post #18

As someone who got started in this field about 10 years ago, I find the mass-adoption of and then mass-exodus from subversion fascinating. I remember sitting in the audience for a talk by Greg Stein introducing subversion at ApacheCon ('02 maybe) and being wow'ed. I'm trying to think if there's another piece of architecture our industry has both so universally embraced & discarded (hyperbole, I know) in the last deca…

It's because 10 years ago there weren't really any distributed version control systems, and the original aim of Subversion was to fix everything that was horribly broken in CVS. They definitely succeded with that design goal, but since they're stuck in a centralized design, there's nothing they can do to move it to a distributed model, and it's not something that could have been foreseen 10 years ago.

They're simply the last technology before a paradigm shift, and that's never a good position to be in.

Re: It’s time to stop using Subversion

#29

Post by jshen »

durin42 wrote: post #20
yuvadam wrote: post #11

Do not confuse elitism with minimalism. Git is simply easier to use, and harder to shoot yourself in the foot with - at least when it comes to the basic flows. (Granted, you can blow your face off with git if you really try hard). When branching in git is a simple git checkout -b newbranch away as opposed to svn copy http://repo.com/some/path/to/trunk http://repo.com/some/path/to/branches/somenewbranch - then what el…

> Git is simply easier to use, and harder to shoot yourself in the foot with - at least when it comes to the basic flows. (Granted, you can blow your face off with git if you really try hard). I don't know. I've trained a lot of developers with Subverison, Git, and Mercurial. Subversion is the one that I've honestly had the least trouble with, and Git the most. Heck, early on with git I had instances where the repo w…

It sounds like you were training people on git when you didn't know git very well. That's an odd way to judge git.

Re: It’s time to stop using Subversion

#30

Post by yawgmoth »

selectnull wrote: post #3

I'm kinda annoyed that every once in a while, somebody has to come along dissing svn, prophesying its inevitable demise and glorifying git. Yes, git is "better" than svn, I agree. I like the message in general, but I don't like the tone of it. I still use svn. For personal project, I have moved to hg. I use git occasionally. They all have its merits, and svn certainly didn't deserve "you should probably stop using it…

It seems to me that a lot of the evangelists of one source control tool over another fail to realize that for companies that -aren't- startups, migrating between tools is a lot of work.

Reconfiguring build servers, rewriting documentation/wiki pages which have SVN Uris (or anything at all regarding existing source control) in them for projects that have existed 5-10 years as well as having an entire team learn a new source control tool is no task to be taken lightly.

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