Why Subversion does not suck

http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/7437/Why-Subversion-does-not-suck.aspx

by asinglenet • 18 years ago

45 38 18 years ago

blog.assembla.com

The Subversion Sucks meme is popular on the Internet. However, if we imagine a world without Subversion and other centralized version control systems, it's easy to see why Subversion does not suck, is not fading away, and in fact, has a rapidly growing user base.

tome3• 18 years ago

In a world without Subversion, Subversion would be built out of Git. In a world without Git, Monotone, Darcs etc. ... well that's where we were 5 years ago, and it sucked.

axod2• 18 years ago

Did it really suck? I was using subversion in a team of around 15, 5 years ago, and all in all it worked pretty well. It was rare that there would be any issue or that subversion got in the way.

Maybe git is better... maybe it doesn't matter enough to bother changing. But you have to admit these types of things are more about what is "in fashion" than what is better suited to a particular task.

Things go in big cycles. For a few years centralization is excellent, offers massive benefits, then suddenly distributed is excellent offers massive benefits etc etc As the post hinted, I wouldn't be surprised if 5 years from now git is pronounced as a terrible idea, and the trend setters go back to something more like svn.

tome3• 18 years ago

It sucked because we didn't have the possibility of distributed version control, even if we really wanted it.

Some people and some projects prefer centralized. That's fine. But you can't build a distributed version control system out of a centralized one.

gcv• 18 years ago

I'm very happy that Subversion works for you. For me, it just blew up on an update, which corrupted the fragile .svn directories it litters all over the working copy. "svn cleanup" couldn't repair the damage. This sort of thing happens on a regular basis.

Git, on the other hand? No problems.

jbjohns• 18 years ago

The issue with SVN is simply the work flow it forces you into. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at someone's repo and see .bak files everywhere. I know right away why they're doing this because I did it myself when I used CVS/SVN.

DVCS's let you branch off, experiment, and if it works out you can push everything into the main tree with the history included.

tome3• 18 years ago

I should perhaps clarify. "It" is having Subversion, CVS and no distributed VCS. I didn't mean "It" to refer to Subversion.

moonpolysoft• 18 years ago

"Even designers can use it."

Why does everyone assume that designers are stupid luddites who can't wrap their heads around complex systems? UI design is full of nuance and complexity. It's insulting to designers to assume they cannot deal with DVCS.

silentbicycle5• 18 years ago

The issue isn't that designers are stupid, it's that, since they tend to have a better design sense (the good ones, at least!), they're generally less forgiving of ugly, needlessly hacked-together systems than people who spend most of their time immersed in them.

Designers are often helpful for a reality check. People should listen to them more!

(There is also nothing about DCVSs that necessitates a bad UI, of course.)

mechanical_fish4• 18 years ago

they're generally less forgiving of ugly, needlessly hacked-together systems...

Huh? Am I the only one who finds Subversion to be very confusing, at the conceptual level, compared to git? All that file-by-file history tracking, just waiting to trip you up when you try to move a file around? The fact that branching in SVN is hopelessly entangled with the concept of copying directories around in some remote repository? Here's the canonical example from the SVN book:

  svn copy http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/trunk \
           http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/branches/my-calc-branch \
      -m "Creating a private branch of /calc/trunk."

I guess I must be the only one who prefers:

  git clone git://github.com/mechfish/calc
  cd calc
  git branch my-calc-branch
  git checkout my-calc-branch
  # ... fiddle around, then when it's time to go back to master ...
  git checkout master   # note: no need to cd anywhere

I suppose that one downside of this is that all your coworkers don't get to automatically see the my-calc-branch on their centralized server. (How terrible it is that your every whim isn't being automatically published to the world!) Instead, when you want to push changes, you have to say something like this:

  git push origin my-calc-branch:refs/heads/my-calc-branch

Or you have to set this up a bit in advance:

  git config branch.my-calc-branch.remote origin
  git config branch.my-calc-branch.merge refs/heads/my-calc-branch

After which you can just do

  git checkout my-calc-branch
  git push

Whenever you want to push up the changes to my-calc-branch. This sort of incantation is not great, but that doesn't mean it can't or won't be improved, and it's not that big a price to pay.

The biggest problem with SVN is that getting started with it is so hard. As a git user, if I have a directory and I want it under version control, I do this:

  cd my-directory
  git init
  git add *
  git commit -m "Initial commit"

Done. Put this in a droplet script and your great-grandpa could do it. (He'd have to read some blogs to figure out what to do next, but at least it's a start. And even if all he knew how to do was this:

  cd my-directory
  git commit -a -m "I committed today"

and he did it every now and then, that would be great! Like a tiny, hidden, aperiodic, directory-specific version of Apple's Time Machine. His industrious great-granddaughter could use these snapshots to clean up after his PHP experiments...)

As an SVN user, you need to find a hosted repository, get admin permission on it, set up the canonical directory structure -- being very careful to heed these words from the SVN book (you did read the SVN book, right?):

While Subversion's flexibility allows you to lay out your repository in any way that you choose, we recommend that you create a trunk directory to hold the “main line” of development, a branches directory to contain branch copies, and a tags directory to contain tag copies.

... and then import your project, being sure to get it imported into /trunk and not into /trunk's parent. Then you have to check it out -- being sure to check out /trunk, or at least to do all your work in /trunk, lest you screw yourself up or confuse yourself.

So I assume that by "ugly, needlessly hacked-together systems" you mean "systems that make you use the command line". The only reason Subversion seems at all simple to non-geeks (to the extent that it does, which isn't much of an extent) is that the authors of tools like TortoiseSVN and Versions have sweated bucketloads of blood to design beautiful interfaces which hide all this cruft from the end users. DVCS will get there. Give it time.

mechanical_fish4• 18 years ago

Amen.

Meanwhile: To claim that SVN is intrinsically easier to understand than DVCS is to be very shortsighted. Subversion is a more mature technology: It's eight years old, and is conceptually based on CVS, which goes back to the eighties. DVCS is all of eleven years old in its eldest incarnation (according to Wikipedia) and the current generation of tools (git, Bazaar, Mercurial) date back only to 2005.

DVCS is a maturing technology. One of the things that happens as a technology matures is that people learn better ways to explain it to new users, build better interfaces, build better infrastructure.

If you don't think that DVCS makes enough sense to non-geeks yet... give it time.

silentbicycle5• 18 years ago

The article isn't really about SVN vs all DCVSs, though, it's specifally about subversion's interface vs. git's.

There's no reason a DCVS can't have a clean, easily usable interface (darcs's is better than git's, for example), but the git developers have focused on features and raw power over usability.

scott_s2• 18 years ago

I understand your point about maturing technology, but distributed anything is usually hard for people to wrap their heads around the first time.

old-gregg• 18 years ago

Because designers, unlike programmers, have much higher standards for tools. They don't jump on a new "ground-breaking" toy every 2 months, just because someone famous had said "this is THE shit - use it".

Whenever someone says "even X can use it" about some technology, it usually means that either X is stupid, or X is very busy and has no time to waste on "yet another Y".

That said, git can be used in a perfectly centralized fashion, just like SVN. (I use it for automatic synchornization of all my files across 3 laptops via central NAS). And there are some cool GUIs popping up.

jcl• 18 years ago

In this case, however, when they say "even X can use it", they definitely mean "X is stupid". From earlier in the article:

But, this growth industry of training doesn't reach designers, clients, and other non-programmers, because this stuff is just too complicated for them.

thwarted• 18 years ago

I'm not sure this generalization applies to even a significant portion of either designers or programmers. As a human who uses tools, I want my tools to be reliable first and foremost, but since 100% reliable is a fantasy, it is always wise to be both on the look out for more reliable tools _and_ to know the tools you to use constantly intimately, inside and out, so you are more productive and less surprised by gotchas that the tools have. A tool that fails unpredictably or in a way that can't be fixed is a useless tool. You must know the limitations of your tools, to not know the limitations is to be unable to recognize when something better comes along. Not exploring new options and not being well versed with your current tools, or just doing one or the other, is wearing blinders.

almost• 18 years ago

Designers tend to have different sets of skills then programmers. In my experience they're not stupid, but they would tend to find a tool like git much harder to learn then you or I and it would give them less benefit even if they did.

lallysingh• 18 years ago

So easy, even a caveman can use it.

It's literally the same argument.

scott_s2• 18 years ago

The author sets up a false dichotomy: Subersion or git. But those are two different models of source control: centralized and distributed. If you want to use centralized source control, the choice is more likely to be cvs or Subversion.

The popular notion isn't that Subversion sucks, but that it's pointless. The claim I hear is that it's a reinvention of cvs, but it doesn't actually improve much. Personally, I had to learn cvs, it's simple enough for my needs, and I see no reason to switch to something that's fundamentally the same thing.

I think most cvs users are in a similar situation as me. We know Subversion is better, but those benefits seem marginal and not worth the effort to switch.

ConradHex• 18 years ago

Subversion, in my experience, is worth the effort of switching from cvs. It's a breeze to set up, and it's a lot cleaner than cvs.

mpk• 18 years ago

I have a lot to say about version control, but I won't get into the details here.

However, on the 'switch from CVS to SVN', I'll comment and say that SVN is far superior to CVS.

The whole 'changes committed to the repo up the entire repo version' alone make this worthwhile.

SVN is also less arcane in its usage.

SVN has better tools for, well, everything.

SVN integrates well with all major IDEs (mine being VIM, but also Monodevelop and Eclipse).

The switch from CVS to SVN also made our releases much easier to manage (merging branches is fairly trivial and tagging is a no-brainer).

If you're using CVS in a company, do yourself a favour and switch to SVN. The basic concepts are the same, so re-educating developers takes all of 5 minutes.

biohacker42• 18 years ago

This is a terrible argument.

Easy when it comes at the cost of features is another way to say it's OK to be ignorant.

It's one thing to make things as easy as they can be.

It's one thing to not complicate things unnecessarily.

But it's a whole'nother thing to make things easy at the cost of features and power.

Anyone can make anything easy if they are allowed to cut enough features.

silentbicycle5• 18 years ago

Is declining to use something significantly complicated by features you know you will never need ignorant?

mtoledo2• 18 years ago

Curious, we use assembla on our team and our designer uses git (assembla's git) without any problems.

It's great if people want to have the choice for subversion, tho. Some people just prefer the tools they are used to instead of learning new, more powerful ones. But to use that as argument that svn doesn't suck is not a very strong point.

mtoledo2• 18 years ago

Though, when I showed him the article, he agreed with it.. so maybe he's right. :-D

mhartl• 18 years ago

Branching and merging suck in Subversion. Offline commits suck in Subversion. Does that mean Subversion sucks? Depends on whether you want good branching and merging and offline commits. I do; therefore, for me, Subversion sucks. QED.

thorax• 18 years ago

For what it's worth, they've improved branching and merging (on the backend) not long ago. Of course it's not inherent to the platform like most DVCS.

blasdel• 18 years ago

Subversion isn't even better than CVS across the board: it's slower, wastes a lot of space, is way less stable, and doesn't have independent implementations.

jonursenbach• 18 years ago

Here's an idea. Instead of throwing around "Subversion sux", "Git is the new hotness", how about we all just use what works for us and the projects we're working on.

atlei• 18 years ago

Agree ! Having gone from nothing to Subversion, I think Subversion is great (with TortoiseSVN, at least).

Are there better tools ? Is Git better ? Maybe, but different tools for different uses. For me personally, Subversion does not suck, and I don't need a "better" tool.

It works, and gets the job done for me !

kingnothing• 18 years ago

It's helpful for me to see these articles pop up since I don't currently use a revision control system such as subversion or git. Granted, I'm not looking for one at the moment, either, but it does plant seeds in the back of my mind for when I do need one.

globalrev• 18 years ago

All I know is is that Git i supereasy to use for a beginner for 1-man-projects if you get the right help or tutorial. Preferrably start a repo at github and you will be waled through how to create a repo(not that there is much to it).

git init git add . git commit -m "blah" git push origin master

git branch name git checkout

easy-peasy

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

For the stuff I do I find both svn and git get the job done. The only thing that I regularly experience that sucks about svn compared to git is the speed of checking out a working copy. Even when using tiny local file:// repositories svn checkouts on my OSX laptop often take several seconds where similar git operations are instantaneous.

Why Subversion does not suck

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