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I use Subversion at my gig in several places. I don't use it to manage source code revision control, but I have several processes that require business users t

I use Subversion at my gig in several places. I don't use it to manage source code revision control, but I have several processes that require business users to manage binary files (such as audio files) in order for them to be automatically deployed to production. Git or Mercurial are pretty awful at this kind of role. Subversion let's me check out at a subfolder level of a repository, and not pay the cost of having the full revision history contents sitting in my clone.

sofixa 4y ago
Git is much better at it nowadays thanks to Git LFS which just stores the blobs.
- detaro 4y ago
  in exchange for yet another set of things to worry about to explain to/debug for non-technical users.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    I don't think the intended audience for Git LFS is non-technical users.
    - detaro 4y ago
      Then why do you mention it in response to someone describing their use of SVN because it's better for non-technical users?
mananaysiempre 4y ago
Core Git is not the greatest at large binaries, so for that you indeed probably want an addon like git-annex or Git LFS or an alternative such as dvc, but in recent versions it absolutely can[1] only give you only part of the history or part of the objects: the former is known as “shallow clones”, the latter as “partial clones” (there are also “sparse checkouts”[2], but those only concern the working tree IIUC). [1] https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-clone-and-shallow-clone/ https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-... [2] https://github.blog/2020-01-17-bring-your-monorepo-down-to-size-with-sparse-checkout/ https://github.blog/2020-01-17-bring-your-monorepo-down-to-s...
dave78 4y ago
Similarly, we used to use SVN for a mechanical engineering team doing CAD models. SVN supported a reserved checkout mode (I guess SVN calls it "locking") which meant only 1 person could check out a file at a time. Perfect for non-mergeable binary files, and with TortoiseSVN it was easy for non-SW engineers to use. That's one thing I doubt Git will ever be able to do since it is a distributed model rather than server-based.
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  It does? That’s a requirement for version control for cad I think (just wrote a huge comment yesterday in here about it). I might actually try to use svn in 2023.
  - P_I_Staker 4y ago
    If you're using lfs for cad, it has file locking
- P_I_Staker 4y ago
  File locking exists for LFS, which you could argue is the main place you'd need it... if you want to "lock down" other files, there's ways to handle that in the process, eg. pull requests
gschoeni 4y ago
Been working on a version control system to solve this large binary file problem as well. It's called Oxen and is initially targeted towards unstructured machine learning datasets, but could be good for this use case as well. Would love to get any feedback on it! https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release

sofixa 4y ago

Git is much better at it nowadays thanks to Git LFS which just stores the blobs.

detaro 4y ago
in exchange for yet another set of things to worry about to explain to/debug for non-technical users.
- sofixa 4y ago
  I don't think the intended audience for Git LFS is non-technical users.
  - detaro 4y ago
    Then why do you mention it in response to someone describing their use of SVN because it's better for non-technical users?

mananaysiempre 4y ago

Core Git is not the greatest at large binaries, so for that you indeed probably want an addon like git-annex or Git LFS or an alternative such as dvc, but in recent versions it absolutely can[1] only give you only part of the history or part of the objects: the former is known as “shallow clones”, the latter as “partial clones” (there are also “sparse checkouts”[2], but those only concern the working tree IIUC). [1] https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-clone-and-shallow-clone/ https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-... [2] https://github.blog/2020-01-17-bring-your-monorepo-down-to-size-with-sparse-checkout/ https://github.blog/2020-01-17-bring-your-monorepo-down-to-s...

dave78 4y ago

Similarly, we used to use SVN for a mechanical engineering team doing CAD models. SVN supported a reserved checkout mode (I guess SVN calls it "locking") which meant only 1 person could check out a file at a time. Perfect for non-mergeable binary files, and with TortoiseSVN it was easy for non-SW engineers to use. That's one thing I doubt Git will ever be able to do since it is a distributed model rather than server-based.

johnwalkr 4y ago
It does? That’s a requirement for version control for cad I think (just wrote a huge comment yesterday in here about it). I might actually try to use svn in 2023.
- P_I_Staker 4y ago
  If you're using lfs for cad, it has file locking
P_I_Staker 4y ago
File locking exists for LFS, which you could argue is the main place you'd need it... if you want to "lock down" other files, there's ways to handle that in the process, eg. pull requests

gschoeni 4y ago

Been working on a version control system to solve this large binary file problem as well. It's called Oxen and is initially targeted towards unstructured machine learning datasets, but could be good for this use case as well. Would love to get any feedback on it! https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release