Re: Subversion uptake in OSS projects

Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>:
> I noticed that Subversion is starting to get some substantial use in
> OSS projects, and did a little research on how that comes about and
> how successful it tends to be. For each project listed at
> http://subversion.tigris.org/propaganda.html, I tried to determine how
> the decision was made to switch to SVN, when they switched, and
> what difficulties they've been having.

I can add one story about Subversion uptake in a non-open-source context.

One of my best friends is a computer scientist named Paula Matuszek. She
runs an AI group that supports drug discovery at SmithKline Beecham, a
large pharmaceutical company. They use open source extensively for their
development work.

She reports that they switched to Subversion from RCS/CVS a few months back.
She said the initial conversion and setup was a pain in the butt, but that
they have been extremely happy with Subversion since. "Very nice," she
says. "Much cleaner and more natural than CVS."

That RCS merge-by-symbol issue I've been banging on about? That was,
apparently, a big part of the pain in the butt. I suspect Paula's and
my experience is typical, and that more powerful and flexible RCS-to-SVN
tools would do much to speed up adoption.

-- 
		Eric S. Raymond
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