I read TDWTF as cautionary tales. I find this one to be reasonably (and scarily) believable. This 'Tom' guy probably looked at Subversion and decided, 'hey, his

I read TDWTF as cautionary tales. I find this one to be reasonably (and scarily) believable. This 'Tom' guy probably looked at Subversion and decided, 'hey, history tracking is a GREAT thing, but I want to be able to see the history IN THE FILE ITSELF.' Thus was born JDSL. The closing paragraph puts it perfectly. The design lends itself to production running latest trunk (because, obviously, it's assembled at runtime FROM SVN). The idea that a commit could instantly break production is horrifying. Just another example of a developer looking for a problem to apply his solution to.