Comments on: Subversion sucks, get over it

By: arealprogrammer

arealprogrammer — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:06:10 +0000

99% of code written is mundane uninspired hacks anyway, so really I think it’s programmers who have to get over themselves. It doesn’t matter where you store your code, it sucks, get over it. I think it’s a hoot that wars develop over a simple code repository, do you really think you matter all that much?

By: anonymous

anonymous — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:55:43 +0000

ur stupid

By: mabri

mabri — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:41:13 +0000

@Ben, comment #128: to solve what you call the “problem of real-time versioning” one would use a
versioning filesystem, not a version control system, IMHO. I for one like determine what goes together in a
changeset or revision, what the commit message reads, and don’t like my every file save to be versioned,
as it would be with inotify (at least not in the or a project’s repository).

By: Brian M

Brian M — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 06:05:30 +0000

Let’s see SVN do this:

Create a complete base tree of source. Create a sub project and Call it DEV.
Create another sub project off the root called QA. Now, SHARE all of the files from DEV into QA. Call a batch file that PINS everything.
Create a sub project off of the root called RELEASE. Share all the files from DEV in QA and call a batch file that PINS everything.

If I fix bugs, I do it in dev. I “promote” to QA by simply un-pinning the file in QA and re-pinning at the new version. My builds all run off of QA source.

When QA gives the green light, everything in RELEASE is unpinned and re-pinned at the QA version.

This is idiot-proof. I know, I have worked with so many idiots it’s hard to count. You SVN guys, I hope to hell you don’t make a mistake merging all of that spaghetti. Good Luck.

And, as if having to run a utility once a week to compact your database is such a big deal. Wusses.

Brian M.

By: Andreas Krey

Andreas Krey — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:46:08 +0000

If it were only six minutes. I just made a wrong svn switch (forgot the last component in the path; trunk/c to branches/wawa instead of branches/wawa/c), Ctrl-C’ed it after I saw Makefile disappear. After that svn switch or update call for cleanup, and cleanup does not work. Thus I had to re-checkout everything — over GPRS. Real fun ensued. (The big subtree was already gone in the old sandbox, so rescuing it wouldn’t be any faster.)

Now if it were as easy to kill repositories…

By: Trying out Mercurial with VisualHG

Trying out Mercurial with VisualHG — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:03:29 +0000

[...] really fun to read page about someone that really hates Subversion too. I think I mentioned some other bad articles about subversion before. I think Subversion is ok if you just want to make a simple checkout from [...]

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:28:59 +0000

A recent conversation had about SVN:

web1:/usr/local/zend/apache2/htdocs/workspace/ben # svn cleanup
svn: ‘application/layouts’ is not a working copy directory
web1:/usr/local/zend/apache2/htdocs/workspace/ben # svn cleanup
svn: ‘application/layouts’ is not a working copy directory

(1:38:22 PM) Aj: oh I’m going to stab svn
(1:38:40 PM) Aj: grrr

(1:44:07 PM) Aj: okay everything is fixed

… The sad truth of version control systems is that these precious minutes in this case 6 minutes are lost over and over again … instead of being unobtrusive version control is intrusive modifying the way you work, the way you store and organize your projects.

The server model:
Subversion and all revision control miss the mark because the server-model is important when it comes to revision control, and code access. Moving a project into a working space, and porting the project, editing it, and differencing and controlling file revisions over a timeline (yes we do work in time) is extremely important.

Things like iNotify exist, diff exists, and many other linux server tools exist.

Subversion doesn’t integrate with any server-architecture and this is why it fails and sucks.

It’s crappy and complicated and confusing to teach new developers to use, and it adds an unnecessary overhead to a project.

Subversion and all revision control systems fail to solve the CDP or “Real time versioning” problem.

only iNotify, or consistently and constantly examining file system changes is capable of this.

Version Control needs to address conflicts at-the-server and employ a workspace model. Conflicts shouldn’t be dealt with at the time of replication – what subversion calls “committing”. The client shouldn’t issue a commit the server should issue the commit after the source has already been exchanged. Version control should manage versions for multiple instances of the same project and consolidate them on a schedule, or driven by a user.

In general version control fails completely for non-technical users… Version control file-systems are a good replacement, but this doesn’t truly work for coding environments where the idea of a “project” and “application” exists.

By: Andreas

Andreas — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:11:54 +0000

The answer to that is yes and no. I’ve written up a rough draft for the post, I’m not satisfied with it and I’m not sure I’d want to post it either way.

That said, I’ve been thinking about this again recently and the discussion really just boils down to an opportunity cost issue for me. Anyone who’s using Subversion is avoiding the cost of change, but also paying the cost of lost ways to increase efficiency on their use of version control. Any argument from the business standpoint will have to be based on that.

I’m also annoyed with the ‘average devs’ strawman, but in the end that just boils down to the cost of change thing.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:57:53 +0000

“So far the assumption has focused on open source projects, but almost all these points apply in some fashion to the business case as well. The cases are more varied and not necessarily as clear, but they are all there. I’ll look at these issues in a future post.”

I know this is over 6 months old, but I was curious if you’d ever come up with the post to which you refer above?

By: Interesting riposte on git v subversion « Andreas Jacobsen’s Distraction

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:03:21 +0000

[...] a comment » Andy Singleton posted a reply to (among others) my rant on Subversion sucking. The thought experiment is pretty interesting. I’m not convinced [...]