6 ms·

"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 las

by 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 ago
Unfortunately, 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 ago
  Indeed, if nothing else than for access to the Github community.
  - masklinn 13y ago
    Github 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 ago
      I'm not sure whether to trust that first announcement...
      - masklinn 13y ago
        You 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 ago
  SVN 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?
  - untothebreach 13y ago
    I would think that people who already thought SVN is great probably continued thinking SVN is great, and people who thought otherwise, continue to think otherwise. I currently have to use both in my job, and look forward to when our conversion to git is complete.
    - silon3 13y ago
      Imo the core of git is superior, but the command line interface of SVN is much better. Git is just horribly messy. The distributed stuff push/pull had a lot of work and improvements, but the work/commit cycle is just messy, at least when compared to SVN or mercurial.
      - untothebreach 13y ago
        That's fine, I just happen to respectfully disagree :) I started with git though, so I'm sure that has something to do with it. I learned and used git for quite a while before I had to use svn for work, and I found myself very annoyed with certain svn-isms.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    If any SVN dev truly believes that svn is better than git in any technical sense then I wouldn't trust the engineering judgment of that developer. However, it's also clear that svn is a hugely important project, not just for legacy reasons but also to provide certain benefits (mostly around simplicity and control) that many organizations need. But SVN itself has none of those needs, it's an open source project of the nature for which git was specifically designed. So I'd think any rational developer would say it's perfectly reasonable for SVN development to use git. All else being equal, of course dogfooding is ideal, but in this case all else is clearly not equal.
- flatline 13y ago
  Indeed, I recall the mercurial maintainers discussing a move to git in all seriousness.
  - jordigh 13y ago
    What? I don't believe this. Git has nothing that hg devs would want, and lacks many features that hg aficionados like me love. Where did you see this move?
    - flatline 13y ago
      Wish I could find it now, it was linked to on HN between 6 and 12 months ago IIRC, it was on an issue tracker or mailing list archive. A number of the devs were in favor of moving to git, it was shot down but was an interesting discussion and appeared to be serious. Git was a better fit for some particular use case in the workflow on Hg trunk, but now the details have escaped my mind.
      - jordigh 13y ago
        It's April 2, no longer cool to be an April fool.
- apendleton 13y ago
  And plausible that a bunch of respected developers could actually be that nasty to each other in a ticket thread.
- Xylakant 13y ago
  In which universe would that be plausible. It's not in the one that I live in. The SVN developers were always fairly candid and open about the fact that they think, that SVN is the tool they want to build, but that their priorities do not align with every other project under this sun. That is, unlike Linux, who promotes git as the superior and end-of-it-all VCS, the SVN people publicly state that they're building a system that adopted certain tradeoffs that may make it unsuitable for some kind of project - especially for the linux kernel. [1] Even though I dropped SVN and adopted git for the large majority of my projects, I still see the occasional project that would be served much better by using a stupid, centralized VCS such as SVN and I'm happy that SVN exists and continues to thrive. [1] http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html
p4bl0 13y ago
Another very April fools this year is the one of the Gallium Inria team (the one behind the OCaml programming language): they released a French version of OCaml. What's awesome is that the provided source actually compile to the described compiler! See http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/ocaml-5/ http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/ocaml-5/

by smtddr 13y ago

cwoac 13y ago

Unfortunately, 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 ago
Indeed, if nothing else than for access to the Github community.
- masklinn 13y ago
  Github 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 ago
    I'm not sure whether to trust that first announcement...
    - masklinn 13y ago
      You 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 ago
SVN 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?
- untothebreach 13y ago
  I would think that people who already thought SVN is great probably continued thinking SVN is great, and people who thought otherwise, continue to think otherwise. I currently have to use both in my job, and look forward to when our conversion to git is complete.
  - silon3 13y ago
    Imo the core of git is superior, but the command line interface of SVN is much better. Git is just horribly messy. The distributed stuff push/pull had a lot of work and improvements, but the work/commit cycle is just messy, at least when compared to SVN or mercurial.
    - untothebreach 13y ago
      That's fine, I just happen to respectfully disagree :) I started with git though, so I'm sure that has something to do with it. I learned and used git for quite a while before I had to use svn for work, and I found myself very annoyed with certain svn-isms.
- dasil003 13y ago
  If any SVN dev truly believes that svn is better than git in any technical sense then I wouldn't trust the engineering judgment of that developer. However, it's also clear that svn is a hugely important project, not just for legacy reasons but also to provide certain benefits (mostly around simplicity and control) that many organizations need. But SVN itself has none of those needs, it's an open source project of the nature for which git was specifically designed. So I'd think any rational developer would say it's perfectly reasonable for SVN development to use git. All else being equal, of course dogfooding is ideal, but in this case all else is clearly not equal.
flatline 13y ago
Indeed, I recall the mercurial maintainers discussing a move to git in all seriousness.
- jordigh 13y ago
  What? I don't believe this. Git has nothing that hg devs would want, and lacks many features that hg aficionados like me love. Where did you see this move?
  - flatline 13y ago
    Wish I could find it now, it was linked to on HN between 6 and 12 months ago IIRC, it was on an issue tracker or mailing list archive. A number of the devs were in favor of moving to git, it was shot down but was an interesting discussion and appeared to be serious. Git was a better fit for some particular use case in the workflow on Hg trunk, but now the details have escaped my mind.
    - jordigh 13y ago
      It's April 2, no longer cool to be an April fool.
apendleton 13y ago
And plausible that a bunch of respected developers could actually be that nasty to each other in a ticket thread.
Xylakant 13y ago
In which universe would that be plausible. It's not in the one that I live in. The SVN developers were always fairly candid and open about the fact that they think, that SVN is the tool they want to build, but that their priorities do not align with every other project under this sun. That is, unlike Linux, who promotes git as the superior and end-of-it-all VCS, the SVN people publicly state that they're building a system that adopted certain tradeoffs that may make it unsuitable for some kind of project - especially for the linux kernel. [1] Even though I dropped SVN and adopted git for the large majority of my projects, I still see the occasional project that would be served much better by using a stupid, centralized VCS such as SVN and I'm happy that SVN exists and continues to thrive. [1] http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html

p4bl0 13y ago

Another very April fools this year is the one of the Gallium Inria team (the one behind the OCaml programming language): they released a French version of OCaml. What's awesome is that the provided source actually compile to the described compiler! See http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/ocaml-5/ http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/ocaml-5/