Re: Switching to Subversion

[Stefan Monnier]

> revisions were imported". But having these files in a single directory
> is not a *fundamental* property of FSFS; it can be easily changed, and
> in fact there's been already talk of doing it. It would be trivial.

I don't really want to get into this thread, but I'm interested in the
subject, so I'll just comment here.  I don't really like Subversion and
would rather use some other tool for the following reason:

- The above comment is something I've often heard about Subversion: "this
  or that internal feature is not prevented by SVN, it's just not supported
  yet, but someone's already working on it".  In contrast the other
  competitors tend to suffer from a underdevelopped UI rather than
  underdevelopped internals.  The support for merging is an obvious case
  in point.  Basically Subversion's been UI-driven, with fundamental
  features retrofitted afterwards.  That is a design methodology which
  doesn't always result in the cleanest and most robust result.

- Subversion has had more hours (and manhours) devoted to it than the sum of
  its competitors, yet it still lacks the most commonly needed tool
  (besides what CVS already offers): merge support.

- Subversion is a big and heavy piece of software, which I'm not very eager
  to have to rely on.

- Subversion is strongly associated in my mind with Open Source as opposed
  to Free Software.

So I'd rather use Arch, DaRCS, Mercurial, GIT, you name it.
Now, I'm sure the above has some misconceptions, because I haven't looked at
Subversion in a long time (I was following it fairly closely at its
beginning, before alternatives like Arch started to appear), but I believe
that the core ideas are still valid.


        Stefan