Thank you for the information. I am hopeful that one of the outcomes the log4j
situation is that ASF project funding would be increased but I suspect that
thinking is naive. Companies have little incentive to invest in something that
“works well enough”. I too work for a company that has substantial subversion
usage but will not support any development on it.
We are a bit of a unique situation because we have a monorepo with 30-40
different subprojects and the different subprojects have files with the same
name (go.mod, cargo.toml, some .hcl files and some others) that have very
similar or identical content. Originally we had that repo in git but the
combination of so many identically named files with similar/identical content
really messed with things like “git log —follow” and generally the file level
tracking of git since of course git just cares about the tree/blobs and not the
files. We ran tests and subversion 1.14 handled those scenarios substantially
better than git since subversion does track files. We investigated fossil but
it seems to be mostly driven by one person and doesn’t have even the subversion
level of community support.
I hope that subversion continues to be around and thrive for a long time
because even though git “won” the vcs war, I think that subversion does still
have some advantages in a centralized corporate environment.
> On Dec 13, 2021, at 10:24 AM, Nathan Hartman <hartman.nat...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Dec 13, 2021 at 10:37 AM Stefan Sperling <s...@elego.de> wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 13, 2021 at 07:14:46AM -0600, Luke Mauldin wrote:
>>> It looks like the stashing functionality is still experimental. Do you
>>> think there will be more funding in the future to complete it or do you
>>> think it may remain unfinished for a long period of time?
>>>
>>
>> I do not know any specifics about the funding arragements that were
>> made for the staging feature. What I do know is what anyone can tell
>> from public records such as our mailing list archives and in our commit
>> history. Julian, like many others, is working in other jobs nowadays and
>> has not actively contributed much to SVN during the last year or so.
>>
>> I suspect there are still some developers who would be open to the idea
>> of returning to continue working on in-progress features if they could
>> put food on the table in return. A simple fact is that any altruism
>> these people have spent over years in order to provide this tool to
>> communities and companies has largely run dry by now. While SVN grew
>> up because many of its developers were on paid time since 2000, many
>> were also willing to invest some of their free time to help out because
>> this was a fun and challenging project to work on.
>>
>> But not many can afford to do such work in their free time forever, given
>> the complexity of the subject matter, the expectations of quality that
>> need to be met, and the fact that most users are now businesses which
>> simply use SVN because it does not cost them a cent compared to similar
>> proprietary offerings which are usually very expensive. I know this
>> because over the course of about a decade I have helped many such
>> companies move over to SVN from such platforms, and SVN works so well
>> for many of them that most do not even see a need for a paid support
>> contract to get help in case things go wrong. I have seen people in
>> companies who wanted to pitch such things to their bosses but found
>> themselves in a difficult spot when trying to justify a budget for
>> SVN tooling ("wait, did we not just got rid of ClearCase in order
>> to save such costs...?")
>>
>> And naturally, the longer people have moved on with their lives,
>> the less interest they will have in returning to past projects.
>
>
> That leaves us as a community-driven project, and while I agree that
> the codebase is complex and quality matters (hey, we all keep crucial
> information in this thing!) that should not be a deterrent to anyone
> interested in getting involved.
>
> We have a gigantic pool of users worldwide who depend on Subversion
> and for whom other software isn't the right fit, and we need help with
> many different skill areas besides coding, including translations,
> documentation, testing, improving the website, bug triaging, etc.,
> etc. Every little bit of help from each person counts and benefits
> everyone, and if each person did just a little bit, it would make a
> huge difference. It's like everyone putting a flower pot on their
> windowsill. Soon the whole city looks nicer.
>
> Cheers,
> Nathan
