On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 5:26 PM Nathan Hartman <hartman.nat...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Given that Covid19 affects everyone and nearly all aspects of life > globally, I'd like to ask: > > How has Covid19 affected the Subversion community? > and, conversely, > How has the Subversion community affected Covid19? > > For example: > > Has the quarantine contributed to the recent uptick in activity here?
Well, in my case, maybe a bit. I did continue to work on $dayjob from home (which gave me a bit more flexibility in general, but still work needed to be done). However, the lockdown situation also meant a lot of non-work activities came to a stop (my hobbies and those of the children ... no more taxi-duty every evening :-)). So evenings are more quiet in general now, which means I have some more time to tinker with Subversion :-). OTOH, I think that the 1.14.0 release train had a bigger impact for me. That finally pushed me to get my Windows Dev environment for SVN back in working order (after it had been broken by a reinstall of my laptop). So the pandemic may have given me a bit more breathing room in evenings, but it was the 1.14.0 release that gave me the concrete trigger to focus my efforts. > Has anyone here participated in the response to Covid19 in some way? > (Whether related or unrelated to Subversion.) > > Is Subversion itself helping in any Covid19 efforts? (Research, > treatments, logistics, etc?) I work at the IT department of one of Belgium's largest hospitals (University Hospitals Leuven). Our software is also used in more than 25 other hospitals in Flanders (through the Nexuzhealth joint venture). Although we don't have direct contact with patients, we definitely felt, also at IT, a big impact of Covid19. The spike in pressure for our users (healthcare workers) also translated into a spike of pressure towards IT (both in hardware and in software development). Or, put otherwise: at IT we did our best to support our users as much as possible during these difficult and stressing times. This means being extra flexible and attentive to unexpected situations, quickly vamping up extra features (around tracking (suspected) infections, reporting to outside authorities, optimizing specific workflows, scaling up the work-from-home infrastructure, ...). We use Subversion for version control of our main software stack. Being our resident "Subversion expert" I can tell you I'm very pleased with the rock-solid stability, and straightforward way of working, for our ~100 developers. We have a weekly release cycle for our main product, and these last couple of weeks have also seen a lot of urgent patches in between. It was great to see that Subversion provided a good stable ground while our developers needed to focus on getting things done. Besides Subversion, Apache Ant and Ivy also play a major role in our build proces, so kudos to them too. As well as to the countless Java libraries we use from the ASF :-). > Anything else you'd like to share? > > I hope that all the members of our community are well, and that you > and your loved ones are staying healthy and safe in these difficult > times. > > Warmest regards, and stay healthy, > Nathan Thanks for posting this, Nathan. I also hope the best for you and for everyone else here in our community. Hang in there, things will get better ... -- Johan
