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Re: Subversion, decentralized version control, and the future.

From: eg <egoots_at_gmail.com>
Date: 2007-06-29 03:08:09 CEST

First of all, thanks to you and all the devs for creating and evolving
Subversion!

Second, thanks for the well thought out and well written analysis.

I have to chime in and agree with one major point you make which kept
getting lost amongst previous diatribes on decentralized (vs
centralized). That being that not everyone needs it.

I am sure there are many large organizations who are spread out over
many locations and time zones who are in desperate need of
decentralization. However, there are many of us who are not in that
demographic, and we just don't need the full decentralized model.
Smallish groups of developers who work in a single location for
example... how many of these exist, but have small voices because they
cannot claim to be a big project? Quite a few I would think.

I know I have looked and asked myself, "what benefit would these other
revision control options provide us", and I haven't really seen anything
that would make me switch yet. Again, this is not a knock against these
decentralized options. More a matter of finding and using the right tool
for the job at hand.

>
> Subversion's phenomenal adoption rate (*) isn't due to being the only
> game in town. We never were, if you count the proprietary systems,
> and we're even less so now that the open source version control world
> has become so fertile. The reason Subversion is taking over the world
> is because it is tremendously user-focused, and because it provides
> well-documented APIs that enable other developers to write software on
> top of Subversion.

I would also submit that a constantly updated set of well written
end-user documentation (i.e. the book, etc) has been a huge
factor/benefit... please don't undersell the significance of that.

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Received on Fri Jun 29 03:08:38 2007

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