Re: Subversion's community health

Julian Foad wrote:
>Ah, yes -- I didn't mean to discourage anyone from just describing a
>problem; that can then help others seek a solution. [...]

One thing I wonder is how widely Subversion is in non-published trees, especially corporate trees.

For example, my company uses Subversion internally for our entire corporate tree. It has various advantages over Git in that role: the authz controls are such a huge win, you can version directories, you get real copy history, you can update log messages post facto (this has helped us on more than one occasion). While we don't use the path-locking features, some other companies do, presumably because they work with a lot of non-mergable documents.

I just put out an informal Twitter poll to get a sense of how people are using Subversion these days:

  https://twitter.com/kfogel/status/1139559630059843586

(Or at least, to get a sense of how Twitter users who happen to see my tweet are using Subversion these days :-) .)

There's nothing wrong with software reaching maturity or even declining in use. Lifecycles happen. On the other hand, there might be untapped willingness out there to support Subversion maintenance and development. It's worth making a bit of effort to find out. Perhaps the model this project depended on for so many years -- a small number of tech companies choosing to pay maintainers as staff -- no longer works well, but some other model would work (e.g, something similar to what Tidelift.com is doing).

Best regards,
-Karl
Received on 2019-06-14 18:17:08 CEST