17 ms·

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.

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 actually completely worked on every repository we had and we all thought it would be great. Until nobody believed us. Which in hindsight we should have seen coming, since that was the joke, but nobody actually tried it. Then people tried it and it worked and they thought it was a trick or something. It was really helpful for people migrating from legacy SVN based systems to us (CI and stuff) but I'm surprised to some degree that it's still running 13 years later when nobody is really facing that issue anymore. And I'm still undecided if the joke was worth the massive confusion it caused. But if I'm pressed, I would say that I would 100% release it on April Fool's Day again.

vtbassmatt 4y ago
As the PM who ended up finally killing it, I (on behalf of the team) thank you for your "joke" that wasn't really a joke. It did help some customers who had legacy SVN workloads land on GitHub. I wanted to announce this on April Fool's Day, but just couldn't make the timing work.
- schacon 4y ago
  I tip my hat to your team and I owe you all beers, my friends. You are doing the lord's work.
- klyrs 4y ago
  > I wanted to announce this on April Fool's Day, but just couldn't make the timing work. Thank you for not doing that. Releasing a wacky feature on April 1 is funny. Discontinuing a service that people might rely on is distinctly un-funny.
  - adamdusty 4y ago
    I disagree. It would probably prompt a few support calls and emails, but otherwise I think it would be great.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      I don't read the news on April 1 because it got old decades ago. Sunsetting a service, rather than killing it outright, is a kindness. Making the announcement on April 1 means people will miss it or ignore it. Uncool.
    - rhaway84773 4y ago
      “A few support calls” = At least a few companies who have unnecessarily faced major enough issues that they worked through internal investigations of many different pieces in the stack and then eventually decided to reach out to external support for GitHub, potentially having reached out to other vendors’s support because some PM thought it would be “funny”. I don’t actually think it would cause any problems personally, but I’m astonished at the flip dismissal of a “few support calls”.
- IgorPartola 4y ago
  Instead add FTP version control support with the ability to create backup files.
  - colonelpopcorn 4y ago
    source.php.old.ReallyOld.bak.thistimeitsold.old
    - IgorPartola 4y ago
      Exactly. When it is a small change, just comment it out. But when it’s a large change, create a .old.backup.2013-12-07.dontdelete.
    - m4tthumphrey 4y ago
      source.php_newnewnew
    - rezonant 4y ago
      I wonder how much PHP source code is publically reachable out on the Internet because people would do this without realizing that modphp wouldn't treat it like a PHP file anymore, so an HTTP request to it would cause it to dump the file's source code.
      - mattl 4y ago
        index.php~ for anyone using Emacs
  - snickerbockers 4y ago
    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.
    - Aachen 4y ago
- T3RMINATED 4y ago
  [dead]
- omershapira 4y ago
  I love the internet dearly
ceejayoz 4y ago
> Until nobody believed us. I remember having this problem with Gmail's "1GB for everyone!" April 1 announcement.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  I think April 1st should definitely be "Crazy-but-real announcement day". It'll take some attention off the unfunnier-every-year "jokes" which have turned a pleasant and fun yearly occasion into the internet being unusable for ~36 hours.
  - RockRobotRock 4y ago
    You mean the internet being actually lighthearted and fun (like it used to be) for 36 hours?
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      You sound like the kind of person who thinks saying "it's just a prank bro" makes a variety of awful behaviour ok. AF is a day with a mix of corpos trying So Hard To Be Cool (remember this shit? https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/1/11344044/google-gmail-mic-drop-button-april-fool https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/1/11344044/google-gmail-mic-...) and plainer-than-usual disinformation campaigns. The only redeeming thing about that day is I get to have an excuse to not be reachable for a day and can be disconnected for a while. Hopefully my loved ones don't end up in the hospital on bad timing.
      - admax88qqq 4y ago
        Google used to have some great jokes though. TiSP was great. https://archive.google.com/tisp/index.html https://archive.google.com/tisp/index.html As with any prank or joke there is a skill and art to telling a good one. But I don't think we should let bad pranks outlaw humour in general.
        justusthane 4y ago
butterandguns 4y ago
Where did the name slumlord come from?
COMMENT___ 4y ago
> I'm surprised to some degree that it's still running 13 years later when nobody is really facing that issue anymore. It's still running because Subversion has better CLI. PS The joke is not that funny when it lasts for 13 years. Ha-ha, how funny (not).
eterm 4y ago
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 TFS system where developers would block each other by checking out files which would lock them for the whole repo. I knew that switching immediately to git would have been too much of a culture shock so I got them over to a CVS where people could at least work independently first. ( I also have a soft spot for svn anyway, I think for many small teams it works just as well as git with fewer opportunities to shoot oneself in the foot. )
- vtbassmatt 4y ago
  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-projects-to-github/importing-source-code-to-github/about-github-importer https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/importing-your-projec...
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Is SVN just not used really? Why not continue supporting (or even adding more) alternative version control systems?
pan69 4y ago
If my memory is correct, the content on svnhub.com used to look different back then, was it related to the April Fool's Day joke? https://svnhub.com/ https://svnhub.com/
- vtbassmatt 4y ago
  As part of the deprecation plans, I updated the look of that site to match modern GitHub branding a little better.
joewadcan 4y ago
This was such a help when selling to Enterprises!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
birdyrooster 4y ago
> when nobody is really facing that issue anymore heh heh heh, yeah nobody
filmgirlcw 4y ago
Thank you for building this. Best 13 year “joke” ever — and I do think it also did some good.
flandish 4y ago
Y’all should sunset it on April 1st.
_a_a_a_ 4y ago
And I just want you to know that I know of SVN's shortcomings but I do like it's comprehensibility very much, and though I use git it has caused me a lot of unnecessary pain. FYI.
maegul 4y ago
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!
- Jenk 4y ago
  That's called a "sparse checkout" in git-land. https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-sparse-checkout https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-sparse-checkout
  - thayne 4y ago
    A sparse checkout isn't quite the same thing. It still has to clone the whole repository, it just only puts part of it in the working tree. With svn, you don't have to pull down anything for other directories. More recently, you can combine a sparse checkout with partial clone to get more similar functionality, but it isn't exactly simple.
    - vmiklos 4y ago
      FWIW, it's called a shallow clone: https://git-scm.com/docs/shallow https://git-scm.com/docs/shallow
      - thayne 4y ago
        That is yet a different concept, where it doesn't include the full history, but without a partial clone it still pulls the entire tree for the head commit.
joshu 4y ago
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.
- wayvey 4y ago
  what did it do?
  - joshu 4y ago
    instead of a url, it would just show a rectangle of color.
JadeNB 4y ago
> 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. Obviously it's unimportant compared to the rest of the post, but, in case you like to know, the feature is your brainchild. You would be its brainparent, I guess.
- schacon 4y ago
  It sounded right in my brainpan.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anotherevan 4y ago
I fondly remember that blog post, having a play, and my sheer delight in finding it worked. I've always thought of it as the April Fools' joke that kept on giving.
Sniffnoy 4y ago
> brainchild I have to point out that you've reversed the meaning of this word...
- schacon 4y ago
  Oops, so I have. Or perhaps GitHub’s svn invented me…
dwaite 4y ago
I've always been really curious how this works - from what I remember back in my subversion days, both sides have things which are very hard to represent in one another. I imagine some of those are overcome by enforcing heuristics (e.g. the branches/tags/trunk hierarchy is mandatory and has business logic run based on it), but I'm really curious if there was ever a more detailed writeup on how it works?
tempodox 4y ago
> … I'm surprised to some degree that it's still running 13 years later … Nothing lasts longer than a temporary fix.
nly 4y ago
My company only moved from subversion to got 3 years ago.

vtbassmatt 4y ago

As the PM who ended up finally killing it, I (on behalf of the team) thank you for your "joke" that wasn't really a joke. It did help some customers who had legacy SVN workloads land on GitHub. I wanted to announce this on April Fool's Day, but just couldn't make the timing work.

schacon 4y ago
I tip my hat to your team and I owe you all beers, my friends. You are doing the lord's work.
klyrs 4y ago
> I wanted to announce this on April Fool's Day, but just couldn't make the timing work. Thank you for not doing that. Releasing a wacky feature on April 1 is funny. Discontinuing a service that people might rely on is distinctly un-funny.
- adamdusty 4y ago
  I disagree. It would probably prompt a few support calls and emails, but otherwise I think it would be great.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    I don't read the news on April 1 because it got old decades ago. Sunsetting a service, rather than killing it outright, is a kindness. Making the announcement on April 1 means people will miss it or ignore it. Uncool.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    “A few support calls” = At least a few companies who have unnecessarily faced major enough issues that they worked through internal investigations of many different pieces in the stack and then eventually decided to reach out to external support for GitHub, potentially having reached out to other vendors’s support because some PM thought it would be “funny”. I don’t actually think it would cause any problems personally, but I’m astonished at the flip dismissal of a “few support calls”.
IgorPartola 4y ago
Instead add FTP version control support with the ability to create backup files.
- colonelpopcorn 4y ago
  source.php.old.ReallyOld.bak.thistimeitsold.old
  - IgorPartola 4y ago
    Exactly. When it is a small change, just comment it out. But when it’s a large change, create a .old.backup.2013-12-07.dontdelete.
  - m4tthumphrey 4y ago
    source.php_newnewnew
  - rezonant 4y ago
    I wonder how much PHP source code is publically reachable out on the Internet because people would do this without realizing that modphp wouldn't treat it like a PHP file anymore, so an HTTP request to it would cause it to dump the file's source code.
    - mattl 4y ago
      index.php~ for anyone using Emacs
- snickerbockers 4y ago
  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.
  - Aachen 4y ago
T3RMINATED 4y ago
[dead]
omershapira 4y ago
I love the internet dearly

ceejayoz 4y ago

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

scrollaway 4y ago
I think April 1st should definitely be "Crazy-but-real announcement day". It'll take some attention off the unfunnier-every-year "jokes" which have turned a pleasant and fun yearly occasion into the internet being unusable for ~36 hours.
- RockRobotRock 4y ago
  You mean the internet being actually lighthearted and fun (like it used to be) for 36 hours?
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    You sound like the kind of person who thinks saying "it's just a prank bro" makes a variety of awful behaviour ok. AF is a day with a mix of corpos trying So Hard To Be Cool (remember this shit? https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/1/11344044/google-gmail-mic-drop-button-april-fool https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/1/11344044/google-gmail-mic-...) and plainer-than-usual disinformation campaigns. The only redeeming thing about that day is I get to have an excuse to not be reachable for a day and can be disconnected for a while. Hopefully my loved ones don't end up in the hospital on bad timing.
    - admax88qqq 4y ago
      Google used to have some great jokes though. TiSP was great. https://archive.google.com/tisp/index.html https://archive.google.com/tisp/index.html As with any prank or joke there is a skill and art to telling a good one. But I don't think we should let bad pranks outlaw humour in general.
      - justusthane 4y ago

butterandguns 4y ago

Where did the name slumlord come from?

COMMENT___ 4y ago

> I'm surprised to some degree that it's still running 13 years later when nobody is really facing that issue anymore. It's still running because Subversion has better CLI. PS The joke is not that funny when it lasts for 13 years. Ha-ha, how funny (not).

eterm 4y ago

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 TFS system where developers would block each other by checking out files which would lock them for the whole repo. I knew that switching immediately to git would have been too much of a culture shock so I got them over to a CVS where people could at least work independently first. ( I also have a soft spot for svn anyway, I think for many small teams it works just as well as git with fewer opportunities to shoot oneself in the foot. )

vtbassmatt 4y ago
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-projects-to-github/importing-source-code-to-github/about-github-importer https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/importing-your-projec...
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Is SVN just not used really? Why not continue supporting (or even adding more) alternative version control systems?

pan69 4y ago

If my memory is correct, the content on svnhub.com used to look different back then, was it related to the April Fool's Day joke? https://svnhub.com/ https://svnhub.com/

vtbassmatt 4y ago
As part of the deprecation plans, I updated the look of that site to match modern GitHub branding a little better.

joewadcan 4y ago

This was such a help when selling to Enterprises!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

birdyrooster 4y ago

> when nobody is really facing that issue anymore heh heh heh, yeah nobody

filmgirlcw 4y ago

Thank you for building this. Best 13 year “joke” ever — and I do think it also did some good.

flandish 4y ago

Y’all should sunset it on April 1st.

_a_a_a_ 4y ago

And I just want you to know that I know of SVN's shortcomings but I do like it's comprehensibility very much, and though I use git it has caused me a lot of unnecessary pain. FYI.

maegul 4y ago

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!

Jenk 4y ago
That's called a "sparse checkout" in git-land. https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-sparse-checkout https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-sparse-checkout
- thayne 4y ago
  A sparse checkout isn't quite the same thing. It still has to clone the whole repository, it just only puts part of it in the working tree. With svn, you don't have to pull down anything for other directories. More recently, you can combine a sparse checkout with partial clone to get more similar functionality, but it isn't exactly simple.
  - vmiklos 4y ago
    FWIW, it's called a shallow clone: https://git-scm.com/docs/shallow https://git-scm.com/docs/shallow
    - thayne 4y ago
      That is yet a different concept, where it doesn't include the full history, but without a partial clone it still pulls the entire tree for the head commit.

joshu 4y ago

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.

wayvey 4y ago
what did it do?
- joshu 4y ago
  instead of a url, it would just show a rectangle of color.

JadeNB 4y ago

> 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. Obviously it's unimportant compared to the rest of the post, but, in case you like to know, the feature is your brainchild. You would be its brainparent, I guess.

schacon 4y ago
It sounded right in my brainpan.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

anotherevan 4y ago

I fondly remember that blog post, having a play, and my sheer delight in finding it worked. I've always thought of it as the April Fools' joke that kept on giving.

Sniffnoy 4y ago

> brainchild I have to point out that you've reversed the meaning of this word...

schacon 4y ago
Oops, so I have. Or perhaps GitHub’s svn invented me…

dwaite 4y ago

I've always been really curious how this works - from what I remember back in my subversion days, both sides have things which are very hard to represent in one another. I imagine some of those are overcome by enforcing heuristics (e.g. the branches/tags/trunk hierarchy is mandatory and has business logic run based on it), but I'm really curious if there was ever a more detailed writeup on how it works?

tempodox 4y ago

> … I'm surprised to some degree that it's still running 13 years later … Nothing lasts longer than a temporary fix.

nly 4y ago

My company only moved from subversion to got 3 years ago.