RE: Arguments to favor Subversion

> Here in my company we are trying to switch from VSS to Subversion, but
> some programmers are a bit reluctant about it. It's well known and
> already proved that VSS is weird, limited, buggy and problematic. One
> of the questions was about what big companies are really using
> Subversion in their development environment. Does anyone knows where
> can I find a list of some of those big companies?

Here are some testimonials from 2004:
http://subversion.tigris.org/testimonials.html

I know that a lot of the large companies I'm familiar with are still using CVS. There size makes it more difficult to change over quickly, but they are planning on switching to Subversion.

I think a better indication would be to look at what open source projects are using. Open source tends to be able to react a little more quickly to implement technology. And they don't have to deal with as much bureaucracy to make a change(get permission to install subversion client on desktops, get permission to allow the protocol on the network, get permission to install TSVN, get permission to upgrade to Apache2, etc) I see many of them migrating to Subversion.

You might ask them how many large companies are using VSS.

> They also claim that all they need is just do check-ins and
> check-outs, and don't want to get "complications". I think this
> attitude may constraint the development process with rigid and
> problematic procedures. What's your opinion about preventing the
> development process from using goodies like branching, tagging and
> also the copy-modify-merge model?

In a lot of organizations the only person working with branching and tagging is the defacto subversion administrator. Since svn uses repository wide version numbers, tags are just a semantic convenience (if they are truly treated as tags). Branching is a little more important if you get to a place where one group of people need to do something that will break the build and another need to continue working in trunk, however it isn't something your average programmer really needs to mess with. As long as you've got one or two people who understand branching and can recognize when it would be useful, you'll be fine.

--Mark

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Received on Fri Nov 18 17:22:59 2005