4 ms·

If it was two months ago, why did you start them out with obsolete technology? The only reason I can think of to have SVN today is legacy situations which you

If it was two months ago, why did you start them out with obsolete technology? The only reason I can think of to have SVN today is legacy situations which you obviously weren't in.

warren_s 16y ago
Hey, at least they're using something. There's no need to waste time on a religious war within the church of version control, when there are non-believers who must be shown the light.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  >Hey, at least they're using something. Bad attitude in my opinion. At some point they will have to do a costly and complicated migration to a modern system, and that could have been completely avoided by simply using a modern system to begin with. >There's no need to waste time on a religious war within the church of version control, when there are non-believers who must be shown the light. The only religious behavior I see here is claiming that a two systems are equivalent when they clearly are not.
thibaut_barrere 16y ago
It's obsolete only for a small part of IT (us!), it's definitely not obsolete for them (and a lot of other shops). Three main reasons: - windows support is still far from brilliant for git - even a non-technical user can understand and use tortoisesvn in 2 hours - SVN revisions are really easy to understand Don't get me wrong, I'm using git in a lot of places (including my own projects), but most of my non-technical clients are on svn. EDIT: just so you know, I still know one company (a startup, mind you!) that uses CVS.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  >- windows support is still far from brilliant for git It's not that bad, certainly not much worse than SVN itself on windows. >- even a non-technical user can understand and use tortoisesvn in 2 hours 2 hours? A non-technical person can understand everything about e.g. Git that they're likely to need in less than that. >- SVN revisions are really easy to understand Not sure what you mean here. 1783. Is that somehow easier to understand than an equally meaningless hash key? At least in Git you could describe the version by the checkin text. >but most of my non-technical clients are on svn I think you're really doing them a disservice with this. As soon as they have any kind of accidental corruption I think you're going to be sorely missing Git's recovery capabilities and ability to mathmatically prove you're working with the version you think you're working with.
CrLf 16y ago
SVN is far from obsolete. Just because there are better alternatives now for distributed version control, doesn't mean that the centralized approach has suddenly stopped working. In most places centralized is the way to go. It may be unbelievable for the HN crowd, but most developers use only the bare minimum features of version control, and even then only after being forced to. In this scenario distributed version control causes more problems than it solves, not to mention the lack of integration with IDEs. Yes, that's the real world for ya.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  >Just because there are better alternatives now for distributed version control, doesn't mean that the centralized approach has suddenly stopped working. Except that a distributed RCS can do everything a centralized on can. The funny thing is, this is the last argument used by people religious about SVN but even this doesn't stand up. SVN isn't even particularly good at doing centralized revision control. Do you work somewhere that you'll have to be able to prove what was in a given release? SVN can't do that since you can rewrite history with no way of detecting the rewrite. If this is not acceptable you'll have to buy Fisheye. SVN on it's own isn't useful for much of anything. It's only after applying several other commercial products that you finally get something only substandard.
  - CrLf 16y ago
    You forgot the piece that SVN integrates with IDEs. This is it, case closed. Like I said, in most cases you are trying to convince developers that don't want to use any kind of version control. They want IDE integration, they won't use branches or any other features (some won't even know what the hell "branches" are), they will only use version control as a means to have a centralize repository for the code. And they use Windows. SVN solves the problem. It's either SVN or something worse (CVS and SourceSafe are still widely used). Version control is a tool. You have a set of requirements and you choose the tool based on those requirements. There is no such thing as "obsolete".
    - loewenskind 16y ago

If it was two months ago, why did you start them out with obsolete technology? The only reason I can think of to have SVN today is legacy situations which you obviously weren't in.

warren_s 16y ago

Hey, at least they're using something. There's no need to waste time on a religious war within the church of version control, when there are non-believers who must be shown the light.

loewenskind 16y ago
>Hey, at least they're using something. Bad attitude in my opinion. At some point they will have to do a costly and complicated migration to a modern system, and that could have been completely avoided by simply using a modern system to begin with. >There's no need to waste time on a religious war within the church of version control, when there are non-believers who must be shown the light. The only religious behavior I see here is claiming that a two systems are equivalent when they clearly are not.

thibaut_barrere 16y ago

It's obsolete only for a small part of IT (us!), it's definitely not obsolete for them (and a lot of other shops). Three main reasons: - windows support is still far from brilliant for git - even a non-technical user can understand and use tortoisesvn in 2 hours - SVN revisions are really easy to understand Don't get me wrong, I'm using git in a lot of places (including my own projects), but most of my non-technical clients are on svn. EDIT: just so you know, I still know one company (a startup, mind you!) that uses CVS.

loewenskind 16y ago
>- windows support is still far from brilliant for git It's not that bad, certainly not much worse than SVN itself on windows. >- even a non-technical user can understand and use tortoisesvn in 2 hours 2 hours? A non-technical person can understand everything about e.g. Git that they're likely to need in less than that. >- SVN revisions are really easy to understand Not sure what you mean here. 1783. Is that somehow easier to understand than an equally meaningless hash key? At least in Git you could describe the version by the checkin text. >but most of my non-technical clients are on svn I think you're really doing them a disservice with this. As soon as they have any kind of accidental corruption I think you're going to be sorely missing Git's recovery capabilities and ability to mathmatically prove you're working with the version you think you're working with.

CrLf 16y ago

SVN is far from obsolete. Just because there are better alternatives now for distributed version control, doesn't mean that the centralized approach has suddenly stopped working. In most places centralized is the way to go. It may be unbelievable for the HN crowd, but most developers use only the bare minimum features of version control, and even then only after being forced to. In this scenario distributed version control causes more problems than it solves, not to mention the lack of integration with IDEs. Yes, that's the real world for ya.

loewenskind 16y ago
>Just because there are better alternatives now for distributed version control, doesn't mean that the centralized approach has suddenly stopped working. Except that a distributed RCS can do everything a centralized on can. The funny thing is, this is the last argument used by people religious about SVN but even this doesn't stand up. SVN isn't even particularly good at doing centralized revision control. Do you work somewhere that you'll have to be able to prove what was in a given release? SVN can't do that since you can rewrite history with no way of detecting the rewrite. If this is not acceptable you'll have to buy Fisheye. SVN on it's own isn't useful for much of anything. It's only after applying several other commercial products that you finally get something only substandard.
- CrLf 16y ago
  You forgot the piece that SVN integrates with IDEs. This is it, case closed. Like I said, in most cases you are trying to convince developers that don't want to use any kind of version control. They want IDE integration, they won't use branches or any other features (some won't even know what the hell "branches" are), they will only use version control as a means to have a centralize repository for the code. And they use Windows. SVN solves the problem. It's either SVN or something worse (CVS and SourceSafe are still widely used). Version control is a tool. You have a set of requirements and you choose the tool based on those requirements. There is no such thing as "obsolete".
  - loewenskind 16y ago