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April Fools: migrate Apache Subversion project over to the git repo
- threeseed 13y agoThese April Fools need to stop. It was funny and unique a few years ago. Now it is just used as a vapid, contrived marketing exercise.
- Kudos 13y agoMost are marketing exercises, this one is pretty clearly just people having fun.
- dang 13y agoI'm surprised this comment got hammered so badly given that, to judge by the data I see, more of the community agrees with it than disagrees. I bet it was because the only people reading this post (which I buried) are the ones who are interested in it.
- mukundmr 13y agoIt was funny to see the bureaucracy get into the act. I had a good laugh.
- smtddr 13y ago"gone wrong"? Considering the lameness[1] of april fools jokes on the interwebz in the past few years, this was refreshingly amazing. I can't remember the last time I was actually tricked by an internet april fools joke; this one totally got me. I believed it until I saw this HN post. A+ for fantastic execution. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507297
- cwoac 13y agoUnfortunately, the reason it worked was (as someone who uses both svn and git professionally) it was entirely plausible that the subversion devs would want to use git.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- MetaCosm 13y agoIndeed, if nothing else than for access to the Github community.
- masklinn 13y agoGithub has supported SVN access since April 1, 2010: https://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-support https://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-support and write via svn since May 4, 2010: https://github.com/blog/644-subversion-write-support https://github.com/blog/644-subversion-write-support
- jessaustin 13y agoI'm not sure whether to trust that first announcement...
- masklinn 13y agoYou don't have to trust it, you can go to any gh repository and get the address to the svn access in the sidebar: > You can clone with HTTPS, SSH, or Subversion.
- eik3_de 13y agoSVN Devs thought: haha, no one will really believe we would not prefer SVN rest of the world thought: man, is SVN really so bad that even the devs won't use it? That's sad, but hey, they're responsible developers choosing the best tool for the job. now that we know it was a joke, are we more convinced that SVN is great?
- rando289 13y agoIt did not go wrong which just made this link confusing and not funny.
- yiedyie 13y agoRisky to make jokes with plausible things and especially without a hint. Stackoverflow did it better in my opinion (lots of hints): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507830
- callesgg 13y agoWell it was a good idea/Bad joke.
- Perceptes 13y agoThe headline here is misleading. It didn't go wrong. That was the intended effect. I thought it was brilliant!
- flavor8 13y agoThis is the first april 1st gag I've respected in years. Bringing Jaglieski (ASF co-founder) in as an evil PHB was inspired.
- nixgeek 13y agoNo doubt, this was the #1 joke for April Fools 2014 as far as I'm concerned.
- dsego 13y agoI almost fell for this one: Sublime Text 3 Stable is approaching http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15741 http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15741
- orbitur 13y agoI wonder how many people were like me and completely missed the point of the HN post yesterday. I thought Apache was saying they were moving all their projects to git from svn. I didn't realize svn itself was an Apache project.
- gecko 13y agoProjects are allowed to use Git instead of Subversion, and there's a workflow in place, as noted in the ticket. Many projects have moved, and many haven't. They seem fairly undogmatic in that aspect.
- fat0wl 13y agostill i think you would expect the svn project would use svn :D otherwise it's a pretty treacherous admission of a codebase being legacy only
- skywhopper 13y agoThis is what I thought as well. This seems like a really poor joke. A press release describing such a planned move that praised git and slammed subversion might have been funny. By an actual JIRA ticket is inappropriate.
- kstrauser 13y agoWhy is that inappropriate, out of curiosity?
- reboog711 13y agoI originally thought the same thing, until I read through to the article. Git is already supported by many Apache projects, though. The Apache Flex team did the move quite a while ago, so their primary repository is in Git.
- jblz 13y agoThis was the only April Fools gag that I even chuckled at this year. Good stuff :)
- gpvos 13y agoWhere does it say anywhere on that page that it went wrong? How did you come up with this headline? As far as I can see, it went perfect in every way.
- nashashmi 13y agoYou kidding me? Is this how April Fool's are supposed to go!? If it is, I am quitting the internet on April Fool's.
- gregschlom 13y agoWhat's the problem? Did you read the last post? Most parties "complaining" about the move to git in the ticket were actually aware it was a joke: > And plenty of thanks to all of my co-conspirators on this issue. Yes.. even my antagonist [~jimjag] was in on the ruse :-) … the Infra team handled this with perfect aplomb. And the Directors and Exec Officers came in with a perfect level of wrath. Our Subversion teammates showed a great sense of community and circling the wagons… Thank you all for making this work!!!
- TallGuyShort 13y agoSince almost everyone on the JIRA knew it was a joke, what were the negative consequences that affected you so deeply?
- gpvos 13y agoThe main point of April Fools is that you fool a lot of people. It's more or less in the name. Of course one should put some thought into possible consequences, but I think this one was quite harmless. (Gullible people becoming angry/shocked/etc. is considered harmless.)
- Randgalt 13y agoYes. Absolute perfection. Loved it.
- ithkuil 13y agoTo be honest it would make perfectly sense to host a VCS on another VCS, it's not about religion wars, pride and protecting your offspring. VCS have different features and some teams might be better off by using SVN, while the team developing SVN might be better off by using git to develop in a distributed manner. I understand the need of self-hosting/dogfooding/whatever, so it wouldn't probably be a good idea, but it's not something to flatly dismiss just out of principle.
- gpvos 13y agoYeah, I think dogfooding is the only reason they should still use SVN. However, it's such an important reason that they should not switch to anything else.
- gecko 13y agoI also literally know no SCM, ever, that was not maintained on itself, except insofar as we might be able to have an epistemological discussion about early versions of CVS v. RCS. Bitkeeper, Mercurial, Git, Subversion, Perforce, tla, Monticello, Bazaar, darcs, Fossil, Monotone, and TFS are all maintained on their own systems. Subversion maintaining itself on Git would not exactly be a vote of confidence for me.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoIt would at least give you a lot of confidence that the decision-makers understand that there are differences between various SCMs and that there isn't a 'one-size-fits-all' solution.
- gpvos 13y agoWas SourceSafe maintained on itself?
- gecko 13y agoNo, but that wasn't an SCM. ;-) More seriously, I believe that SourceSafe was maintained on Microsoft's fork of Perforce, but I don't honestly know, nor do I have contacts at this point who'd be able to find out.
- andy_ppp 13y agoHeadline should read: "Apache SVN project to migrate to git after April fools joke gone wrong". This removes the way I read the headline; that the Apache web server was moving from SVN to git. Which doesn't seem funny at all :-D
- vertex-four 13y agoNo, the Apache SVN project is not to migrate to git. The prank was that the Apache SVN project was to migrate to git; it is now not.
- apaprocki 13y agoI wondered for a second "Is CVS still hosted using CVS?" only to discover that the answer is yes and that all is still right in the universe.
- orblivion 13y agoImagine if nobody had it installed, it would be lost forever. Or until someone rebuilt it from the spec.
- dublinben 13y agoCouldn't you just find any old package and install that?
- cubancigar11 13y agoI think the point is that the old packages will fail to install on future computers.
- orblivion 13y agoOh, right.
- jbverschoor 13y agoActually, I thought it made a lot of sense for the project. Subversion still has a place for large-file/binary repos
- chatman 13y agoGone wrong? It was perfect!
- throwaway5752 13y agoAdding to the collection of people supporting this as - finally - an awesome April Fools joke. I give them a 10/10 on conception and execution! Remember the reaction to the initial radio broadcast of War of the Worlds (yes, not a 4/1 event, but as close of a parallel situation that I can recall). Bravo, Apache, nicely done.
- ethnt 13y agoWait, so as a joke, they put it up to a vote to migrate SVN over to Git, and it passed? Now, they have to actually do the migration now?
- logn 13y agoNo, they never voted but a few people said they did in a private meeting as a joke. The entire thing was a joke and they'll stay on SVN.
- rorykirchner 13y agoIt is probably a bad sign for the project's culture that people acting like assholes towards each other gave it an air of legitimacy.
- orblivion 13y agoI'm a little bit confused as to what is going on here. There was a vote to migrate the svn project to git. Did it pass legitimately or as a joke? Is it actually going to happen now? Why is it gone wrong? Why does everybody say it's actually gone right? Why does everybody say that this is a rare example of a good April Fools joke?
- return0 13y agoI believe there was no vote
- unreal37 13y agoThey spent the whole day (12+ hours) viciously debating the move from svn to git, but in the end it was all a joke. That's dedication. There was no vote, and it's not going to happen.
- orblivion 13y agoOk, so "vote passed" is part of the joke, and just the beginning of the argument.
- Igglyboo 13y agoI'm still confused, are the hosting it on git or not?
- zobzu 13y agoGive em an excuse to really switch to git and they'll GLADLY do it! :)
- JoshTriplett 13y agoThe sad thing is that this would be a welcome move, especially the idea of making svn a transparent UI on top of git as a repository backend. Given that github already supports using svn to check out its repositories, generalizing that seems quite sensible.
- haberman 13y agoFrom the InfoQ article yesterday: "Although posted on April 1, the switch is not an April fool." (http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/svn-migrates-to-git http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/svn-migrates-to-git) The whole thing was clever, but I'm not sure it counts as as being "fooled" when the gag specifically denies being a gag. I'm not sure I like this precedent (and I love April Fools jokes in general). But maybe the article from yesterday was a third-party source who had fallen for it? If that's the case, then well-played. :)
- gregfjohnson 13y agoOK damn. I totally fell for this yesterday. Mentioned it to a few colleagues... The thing is, it makes such good sense! :-)