Re: Subversion 2.0

On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 7:13 AM Nathan Hartman <hartman.nathan_at_gmail.com>
wrote:

> The future isn't written yet. It can be anything. And since this is the
> idea phase of Subversion 2.0, there's no need to worry about specifics,
> like how to solve particular coding problems or who specifically is going
> to write what. Right now is the time to dream, out loud. What is your dream
> version control system, if you could have it all? Why would it be that way?
>
> Subversion 2.0, The Idea Phase, now open for business. :-)
>

I think the reason that both Subversion and Git were successful is that
they both had very clear and compelling visions and goals for what they
wanted to accomplish and then they did that.

I do not think a few new features or design changes to Subversion will make
a difference at this point .. and I am not saying that is what you are
suggesting. I would want to be sold on some compelling new ideas for a
product, and then probably why building those ideas on the Subversion 1.x
code base makes sense.

As a cautionary tale I would look at Veracity.
http://veracity-scm.com/compare/

I struggle to find some of the original blog posts that Eric Sink made when
they were creating this product but I know they set out to fix a lot of the
shortcomings in Git and they did so using an Apache license. AFAIK, they
accomplished most of their initial goals and then went on to also
incorporate some of the ideas from Fossil in adding a distributed agile
tracker and wiki to the product as well. Despite all of this the product
landed with a thud and has been discontinued. Aside from wondering why it
would not be a better code base than Subversion to start a new product from
I come back to the compelling idea point. What are the ideas that are
going to move the needle? Who is the target audience? The corporate world
is probably still in play but it seems very difficult at this point to move
the open source world away from Git.

If we come up with some compelling ideas, it might be interesting to invite
Eric to conversation to share what they learned and why what they were
doing never worked. The one thing I can say is that while they were open
source and tried to create a community and be open maybe there are things
they could have done differently that would have had more impact ... such
as trying to make it an Apache Foundation product.

The one thing I will throw out is that I think a new version control
product will need to be written in Rust or Go to attract any attention, not
that I have any experience with either language. A product written in C is
not going to attract new developers - in my opinion.

-- 
Thanks
Mark Phippard
http://markphip.blogspot.com/