Preferences

>even up until 2010, many companies were still hosting code on SVN

I spent part of today choreographing the first part of a massive 30,000,000 LOC SVN to Git migration for my employer with ESR's (phenomenal!) `reposurgeon`. Never underestimate the long tail of database usage, even code data. (Any port in a storm, of course, I'll take Subversion than no VC at all any day of the week.)

Learning this aggressively and increasingly niche skillset is why I wrote https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon/ earlier this week. I had trouble even finding SVN repos in the wild to practice conversion on.


subversion was well-loved by its loyal users at the time as part of "net culture"; speaking of SVN any other way is revisionist. Meanwhile, plenty of companies sold proprietary source code control, since forever; few people loved those products as rigor and management were the constant, user-oriented features not so much, and there was no sense of community or user-control in sight.
As somebody old enough to a.) have used svn, and b.) only fully migrated everything to git in 2010:

Subversion:CVS was like NVMe-SSD:HDD, and Subversion:Perforce was like SATA-SSD:HDD.

Git:Subversion is more like RTX2080:RTX3080, or, say, '78 Datsun 2080Z:'93 Acura Integra.

BETTER, yes, sure, yes.

OMFGIGOTTASWITCHNOW!!!!, not really.

That makes some sense. A lot of the other technical decisions made in the early days of the company were surprisingly well-considered in retrospect, so at a time when it's either SVN or e.g. BitKeeper, a reasonable person would probably also want to stick with SVN.
this hits one important point- git is very bad with large files, and all the "solutions", like git-lfs, are weird cludges

This item has no comments currently.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

j
Next story
k
Previous story
Shift+j
Last story
Shift+k
First story
o Enter
Go to story URL
c
Go to comments
u
Go to author

Navigation

Shift+t
Go to top stories
Shift+n
Go to new stories
Shift+b
Go to best stories
Shift+a
Go to Ask HN
Shift+s
Go to Show HN

Miscellaneous

?
Show this modal