Julian Foad <julianfoad_at_apache.org>:
> Anyone with constructive suggestions, please do share them. Please let us
> not dwell on our sadness and criticism of what went before; let us try to
> keep this thread focused on positive solutions for what to do next.
You guys know me. I'm a past contributor, occasional critic, often a
supporter. I did my best to push back when Linus Torvalds accused this
crew of incompetence. And I, too, have had the recent experience of
watching a project I was hugely invested in - GPSD - slide into a
semi-active maintainence mode.
The main piece of advice I have for all of you is that you should
keep your expectations about Subversion's future realistic.
The brute fact is that git has taken over the version-control world.
It has stomped flat a couple of sttempts to compete with it in DVCS -
Mercurial, bzr, monotone. And Subversion is at a massive disdavantage
relative to *any* DVCS for reasons that should be too obvious to
need repeating.
Does Subversion have a future at all? I think the answer is "Yes",
but it's not an exciting, sexy future. You guys have only two selling
points I can see for new installations (1) Subversion's UI is
*massively* simpler than git's, and (2) some customers have
political/cultural reasons to prefer a centralized VCS with
repositories that can't be easily cloned.
I think that's enough for survival. But it's not exciting, not sexy,
and not a recipe for drawing in new development talent. Thus, if you try
to plan for big things, you will almost certainly fail because you won't
be able to collect the investment of developmen time required to
realize them.
What you *can* hope for is to ship occasional releases of high quality
and maintain Subversion's deserved reputation as the best of the pre-DVCS
version-control systems.
This is what I mean by setting realistic expectations. It means gearing
down - accepting that your release tempo is going to be low and your
main goal is to keep the issue tracker relatively clean.
This is where I am now with GPSD. I had to struggle a bit to accept it,
but the truth is GPSD is mature software that doesn't have much of
anything left to do in its application domain. In an important way,
that is victory.
I'll pitch in here myself; I have plans to collect some more information
about the semantics of the dump format and add it to the documentation
already in the source tree. Because I believe in finishing what I
started and leaving behind artifacts that say "Damn, that guy was a
pro."
You can still have that kind of excellence. It's not a trivial thing.
--
Eric S. Raymond
Received on 2019-06-14 16:35:14 CEST