From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control

That would be very easy to do with FUSE. I would be amazed if it hasn't been done.

I doubt it's really that useful though - it would be difficult to make the filesystem mutable, which means anything that puts caches or build files in the tree (which is most things) wouldn't work.

I did a very quick search. First result: https://github.com/csutorasa/git-fuse

> What SVN didn't fix was the fundamental centralized model. You could not commit without a network connection. The repository was still a single server. "Working offline" meant "reading-only", you could browse history but not record any new work, and the day the server was down was the day the whole team waited.

FWIW this is how most projects work anyway. And IMO Subversion is still the best VCS when you have a lot of large binaries (the various extensions to Git like git-lfs are just hacks that graft a separate half-baked version control system to it and add further complexity to an already annoyingly complex system). I remember working at a gamedev company in early 2010s and out of curiosity i tried to put everything in the 250GB perforce workspace in a git repository only for git to choke and die before it managed to do anything. In comparison, ~5-6 years earlier i worked briefly at a game porting studio where every single game they had ported (which i'm almost certain went all the way back to the 90s), including all data and source (and these were AAA games, not tiny indie games), were into a single Subversion server.

Unfortunately Subversion lost the VCS fashion wars and nowadays it barely seems to have any development. I still use it for a few projects where i do have a lot of binary stuff, but most new things are in Git. I also have a bunch of stuff in Fossil (which also did handle binary files better than Git when i tested it years ago, though not as good as Subversion or P4) but nowadays i convert them to Git when i need to share because, well, pretty much everyone expects Git (and projects such as Codeberg and Forgejo make sharing and self-hosting easier).

Ironically the "fundamental issue" mentioned above was solved not too long ago with Subversion as nowadays you can have multiple "changelists" and each changelist is a full (hidden) SVN repository by itself, allowing you to do commits (as "shelving") and such locally and then push to remote when you're done. AFAIK changelists can also coexist (unlike Git where you can only work at one branch at each time). Unfortunately since Subversion is basically barely held together, only the command-line UI provides that functionality (at least in FLOSS clients) and even TortoiseSvn didn't seem to support it last time i checked.

You could always keep a local svn repository and commit to that, if you really wanted to commit without connectivity. But in practice most people don't, as evidenced by the success of github, which grinds many development processes to a halt every time it is down.

It also ignores svk, which is (was?) a popular add-on to svn, which provided a convenient way to do this and replay all the commits to the central svn repository when connectivity allowed.

> ... there's a clear prompt in the bottom right corner.

Indeed, it does.

> (Didn't try mobile.)

And my eyes didn't make it that far down the screen. If i can't read the first paragraph, there's no point in scanning further down the page (and certainly not to look for something as esoteric as an option to disable what should not be there in the first place). Grumble, grumble.

My experience was actually close to the one from the article. I used SVN for a year or two, moved to git and never looked back