[TxMt] Re: newbie subversion question

[Gerd Knops]

On Mar 27, 2009, at 5:42 PM, Thorsten Hamann wrote:

> Gerd Knops schrieb:
>> I can only shake my head when people throw out wild guesses like  
>> that...
>
> So you know professional software developers who don't know  
> Subversion?
> I'd say "professional" and "not knowing svn" are mutually exclusive.
>
You said use, not know.

>> Subversion is quickly being obsoleted by more powerful tools.
>
> And we all know that companies switch versioning tools all the time.  
> Oh
> wait, they don't. The bigger ones use commercial systems like  
> Perfoce, I
> agree, but I haven't seen it very often. Hell, I even still see RCS/ 
> CVS
> in daily use for BSD config files at some of my clients. Anyone who
> knows the former qualifies for the Get-Off-My-Lawn club. ;)
>
> Just out of curiosity, which ones do you mean? I sure hope you aren't
> talking about the git hype from the Rails community. (I [heart] git,
> BTW, but haven't seen it in use outside the Rails context.)

Subversion (and Perforce etc) does not address the distributed nature  
that is becoming more commonplace and needed in companies large and  
small. Darcs and Mercurial (and some others like the promising but ill- 
fated arch) were addressing that, but are quickly overtaken by git.  
git has a huge momentum (not just in the Rails community), and has  
grown into a very powerful tool. I use it most of the time now, even  
to interface with subversion repositories.

I expect git adaptation to continue growing rapidly. It wasn't quite  
usable for the masses 2 years ago, but it sure is now. And IMHO it is  
a lot nicer to use than most other systems out there. Lately a number  
of high-profile projects have switched to git (X.org and perl come to  
mind). You are right though about bigger companies, they will be slow  
to change.

Gerd