David Brown wrote:
I think the curse of SVN was that they tried to make a better CVS. They
tried to make the limited functionality of CVS work a little better. They
didn't seem to be able to look at other solutions, or even what else has
been developed in the past 20 years. It's actually worse than that. Their
discussions seem to indicate that they are aware of what other things there
are, but don't see value in them. Willful disregard of knowledge counts as
stupidity in my book.
Maybe, maybe not.
SVN tried to be a better CVS--true. When they started work on SVN on
2000, it was not at all clear what a genuinely superior VCS was.
Then Linux adopted BitKeeper about 2002? Even then, it took a while for
BitKeeper to finally converge on a feature set that most people actually
regarded as obviously superior.
In addition, disk space got dramatically larger and cheaper at the same
time that laptops started taking over a lot of developer desks and made
"offline" commit an important issue.
There is a lot to be said for providing developers with something that
is very familiar--and it got SVN a lot of adoption. Subversion and even
CVS outnumber the usage of Git and Mercurial by orders of magnitude.
Subversion integration with tools is quite good; git and hg don't even
rate on that factor.
Decisions are made in the prevailing time given the prevailing
information. The fact that these decisions turned out to be a little
off the mark 8 years later is not "stupidity".
-a
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