3 ms·

Subversion was really good. It wasn't perfect, but it was relatively painless. Instead everyone switched to a "distributed" version control system that is such

by mike_d 3y ago

Subversion was really good. It wasn't perfect, but it was relatively painless. Instead everyone switched to a "distributed" version control system that is such a pain in the ass it is all now hosted by a single company.

rglullis 3y ago
Please, Github is so much more than git hosting. If all it offered was source hosting, no one would care for it.
- mike_d 3y ago
  Github isn't all git, but all git is Github.
  - dreamcompiler 3y ago
    False. I'm working on two large distributed projects now in git. Neither has anything to do with github.
    - zogrodea 3y ago
      I think the meaning of the sentence you're replying to is that GitHub's features are a superset of Git's features which seems true? "Github isn't all git [some features of GitHub are not in Git], but all git is Github [but all features of Git are in GitHub]." Maybe my interpretation is incorrect?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sshine 3y ago
My first job used SVN and it limited workflows compared to git. Branches are more expensive, so people adapt their workflows. I used git-svn on that job, which allowed me to refactor locally; not a feature available to me or others once pushed. My colleagues evaluated git and thought it was too complicated. A few years and a lot of employments later, they’re all using git. I don’t know if it was peer pressure from enough young recruits, but the verdict is clear: git is better than SVN.
dreamcompiler 3y ago
Many companies host git besides github (gitlab and bitbucket to name two), and you can spin up one of your own in about 1 minute on your hardware or on a private cloud vps. A github server is much easier to set up than a subversion server. The reason people use github is because it's free, and because it has issue tracking and a wiki and forking which plain git knows nothing about.
- mike_d 3y ago
  You can absolutely spin up vanilla git on your own machine, but try using it for a week. From some quick Googles it looks like Github has 80% market share of version control with Dollar Store Github (Gitlab) picking up the rest. Everyone uses the pretty tool stack built on top of it because it is overly complex. Git didn't add anything profound that couldn't have been added as a feature to another VCS.
- omgsharks 3y ago
  And nowadays it offers so much more like the GHAS, codespaces, copilot, actions and workflows etc that companies who get entrenched would need half a dozen different vendors to cover the feature set if they were to migrate from GitHub. And in general I feel that their gh cli tool doesn’t get enough praise. Being able to do easy API calls and queries for use in shell scripts (or just the terminal) is great, and the gh copilot is occasionally useful as a refresher for command syntax, or for deciphering some oddball git command you found online. It’s a massive beast to tackle, and few people have a reason to. I don’t see anything doing what git does having a chance at competing with it. It requires a paradigm shift and a completely new product/approach to versioning to break the git dominance.
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  > A github server is much easier to set up than a subversion server. You can't set up a GitHub server.
  - blibble 3y ago
    you can download a VM image of it from their website
0xcoffee 3y ago
I recently started a new job that uses SVN, one thing that really catches me out is that it doesn't automatically add new files. Is there some easy trick I am missing to tell SVN to automatically track everything recursively under a folder?
- janosdebugs 3y ago
  Are you using the CLI or something like TortoiseSVN? Tortoise has a fairly intuitive UI for adding untracked files when you commit.
baazaa 3y ago
Torvalds liked to code on planes back when you couldn't use the internet and that's just about the only use-case I've ever heard where I agree distributed makes sense. Kids these days can't even code at all without chat-GPT, there's a central server hosting the git repo anyway, the whole architecture feels like it was designed for dial-up. I can't think of anything that was doable 30 years ago compute and bandwidth-wise, that we can't do today due to performance reasons, except client-server source control...
calamari4065 3y ago
My very first programming job used Subversion. Even as a freshly minted programmer I knew we were using it completely wrong. My first assignment was to spend several days picking apart an extremely nasty merge conflict from two branches nearly six months diverged. That was a very stupid thing to trust me with, as a major refactor was being blessed by my idiot hands. Management could not figure out how they wanted to maintain a master/production branch. Our 'trunk' was the develop branch, and any time we wanted to push to production.... We deleted the master branch and made a copy of develop. Master branch had no history, you had to track it back into develop and hope you found a trailhead from there. It was a very bad time, and we were left with a very bad product. By the time I left, the codebase was so rotten and broken that we'd abandoned all hope of fixing the deeper issues. I really hated subversion, but mostly the company was just unbelievably mismanaged. I'm sure you can use SVN in a sane way, just not like this

by mike_d 3y ago

rglullis 3y ago

Please, Github is so much more than git hosting. If all it offered was source hosting, no one would care for it.

mike_d 3y ago
Github isn't all git, but all git is Github.
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  False. I'm working on two large distributed projects now in git. Neither has anything to do with github.
  - zogrodea 3y ago
    I think the meaning of the sentence you're replying to is that GitHub's features are a superset of Git's features which seems true? "Github isn't all git [some features of GitHub are not in Git], but all git is Github [but all features of Git are in GitHub]." Maybe my interpretation is incorrect?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

sshine 3y ago

My first job used SVN and it limited workflows compared to git. Branches are more expensive, so people adapt their workflows. I used git-svn on that job, which allowed me to refactor locally; not a feature available to me or others once pushed. My colleagues evaluated git and thought it was too complicated. A few years and a lot of employments later, they’re all using git. I don’t know if it was peer pressure from enough young recruits, but the verdict is clear: git is better than SVN.

dreamcompiler 3y ago

Many companies host git besides github (gitlab and bitbucket to name two), and you can spin up one of your own in about 1 minute on your hardware or on a private cloud vps. A github server is much easier to set up than a subversion server. The reason people use github is because it's free, and because it has issue tracking and a wiki and forking which plain git knows nothing about.

mike_d 3y ago
You can absolutely spin up vanilla git on your own machine, but try using it for a week. From some quick Googles it looks like Github has 80% market share of version control with Dollar Store Github (Gitlab) picking up the rest. Everyone uses the pretty tool stack built on top of it because it is overly complex. Git didn't add anything profound that couldn't have been added as a feature to another VCS.
omgsharks 3y ago
And nowadays it offers so much more like the GHAS, codespaces, copilot, actions and workflows etc that companies who get entrenched would need half a dozen different vendors to cover the feature set if they were to migrate from GitHub. And in general I feel that their gh cli tool doesn’t get enough praise. Being able to do easy API calls and queries for use in shell scripts (or just the terminal) is great, and the gh copilot is occasionally useful as a refresher for command syntax, or for deciphering some oddball git command you found online. It’s a massive beast to tackle, and few people have a reason to. I don’t see anything doing what git does having a chance at competing with it. It requires a paradigm shift and a completely new product/approach to versioning to break the git dominance.
philipwhiuk 3y ago
> A github server is much easier to set up than a subversion server. You can't set up a GitHub server.
- blibble 3y ago
  you can download a VM image of it from their website

0xcoffee 3y ago

I recently started a new job that uses SVN, one thing that really catches me out is that it doesn't automatically add new files. Is there some easy trick I am missing to tell SVN to automatically track everything recursively under a folder?

janosdebugs 3y ago
Are you using the CLI or something like TortoiseSVN? Tortoise has a fairly intuitive UI for adding untracked files when you commit.

baazaa 3y ago

Torvalds liked to code on planes back when you couldn't use the internet and that's just about the only use-case I've ever heard where I agree distributed makes sense. Kids these days can't even code at all without chat-GPT, there's a central server hosting the git repo anyway, the whole architecture feels like it was designed for dial-up. I can't think of anything that was doable 30 years ago compute and bandwidth-wise, that we can't do today due to performance reasons, except client-server source control...

calamari4065 3y ago

My very first programming job used Subversion. Even as a freshly minted programmer I knew we were using it completely wrong. My first assignment was to spend several days picking apart an extremely nasty merge conflict from two branches nearly six months diverged. That was a very stupid thing to trust me with, as a major refactor was being blessed by my idiot hands. Management could not figure out how they wanted to maintain a master/production branch. Our 'trunk' was the develop branch, and any time we wanted to push to production.... We deleted the master branch and made a copy of develop. Master branch had no history, you had to track it back into develop and hope you found a trailhead from there. It was a very bad time, and we were left with a very bad product. By the time I left, the codebase was so rotten and broken that we'd abandoned all hope of fixing the deeper issues. I really hated subversion, but mostly the company was just unbelievably mismanaged. I'm sure you can use SVN in a sane way, just not like this