Re: Subversion in 2010

>
>
> Karl said that "more bugs = more users = probably good". I challenged
> this. If you think I am wrong for challenging this, state your case.

Another point on this I forgot to mention:

With every conclusion, there should be some behaviour to model. That is,
if we conclude that more bugs equates to more users, and this is
healthy, what is the conclusion? Is the conclusion that we should accept
a growing list of bugs as inevitable? What is the value of this
conclusion? How are customers/users being better served by this conclusion?

Is the conclusion that bugs should be left as is treated as lower
priority compared to new features, allowing developers to work on new
features? At what point does this become foolish to the point that
customers/users abandon the product as being bug-ridden and
architectually unsound?

What makes this relevant to this mailing list, is that this is where
Subversion is today. It had a head start on other products, but it is
falling behind these other projects. Beyond a certain threshold, people
will ditch their investment in a product if another product available
does what they want.

This isn't guilt. This is just practical reality. Joe: You stated your
own dis-satisfaction with various aspects of the Subversion
architecture. Other solutions do not have these particular problems.
What keeps you on the Subversion ship, and how long would you be willing
to accept your complaints remaining unaddressed?

For myself, I've been waiting since around 2003 for Subversion to catch
up to other alternatives. It had great promise from the beginning, but
it has proceeded at a glacial pace. I see other very attractice
solutions popping up and surpassing Subversion in the last 3 years. To
me, the difference between this "promise" and "reality" is exactly what
"technical debt" is. When I choose to use Subversion on the promise that
it will one day support reliable merges, even across renames, and then,
nearing a decade later, the implementation does not exist, this is a
problem. Other solutions built these functions in from the start.

So perhaps this is a rant - but I'm hoping it is understood to be
"feelings of a user", which probably represents quite a few users. It
probably even represents some of you. Maybe you don't like my language
or harshness. Maybe you think it is drivel. That's fine. But somewhere,
we can choose to leave. As ignorant or troublesome as we may be, we as
users can choose to leave. We don't want to - but there it is.

Cheers,
mark

-- 
Mark Mielke<mark_at_mielke.cc>