Re: SVN community and Covid19

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 5:26 PM Nathan Hartman <hartman.nathan_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Given that Covid19 affects everyone and nearly all aspects of life
> globally, I'd like to ask:
>
> How has Covid19 affected the Subversion community?
> and, conversely,
> How has the Subversion community affected Covid19?
>
> For example:
>
> Has the quarantine contributed to the recent uptick in activity here?

Well, in my case, maybe a bit. I did continue to work on $dayjob from
home (which gave me a bit more flexibility in general, but still work
needed to be done). However, the lockdown situation also meant a lot
of non-work activities came to a stop (my hobbies and those of the
children ... no more taxi-duty every evening :-)). So evenings are
more quiet in general now, which means I have some more time to tinker
with Subversion :-).

OTOH, I think that the 1.14.0 release train had a bigger impact for
me. That finally pushed me to get my Windows Dev environment for SVN
back in working order (after it had been broken by a reinstall of my
laptop).

So the pandemic may have given me a bit more breathing room in
evenings, but it was the 1.14.0 release that gave me the concrete
trigger to focus my efforts.

> Has anyone here participated in the response to Covid19 in some way?
> (Whether related or unrelated to Subversion.)
>
> Is Subversion itself helping in any Covid19 efforts? (Research,
> treatments, logistics, etc?)

I work at the IT department of one of Belgium's largest hospitals
(University Hospitals Leuven). Our software is also used in more than
25 other hospitals in Flanders (through the Nexuzhealth joint
venture).

Although we don't have direct contact with patients, we definitely
felt, also at IT, a big impact of Covid19. The spike in pressure for
our users (healthcare workers) also translated into a spike of
pressure towards IT (both in hardware and in software development).
Or, put otherwise: at IT we did our best to support our users as much
as possible during these difficult and stressing times. This means
being extra flexible and attentive to unexpected situations, quickly
vamping up extra features (around tracking (suspected) infections,
reporting to outside authorities, optimizing specific workflows,
scaling up the work-from-home infrastructure, ...).

We use Subversion for version control of our main software stack.
Being our resident "Subversion expert" I can tell you I'm very pleased
with the rock-solid stability, and straightforward way of working, for
our ~100 developers. We have a weekly release cycle for our main
product, and these last couple of weeks have also seen a lot of urgent
patches in between. It was great to see that Subversion provided a
good stable ground while our developers needed to focus on getting
things done.

Besides Subversion, Apache Ant and Ivy also play a major role in our
build proces, so kudos to them too. As well as to the countless Java
libraries we use from the ASF :-).

> Anything else you'd like to share?
>
> I hope that all the members of our community are well, and that you
> and your loved ones are staying healthy and safe in these difficult
> times.
>
> Warmest regards, and stay healthy,
> Nathan

Thanks for posting this, Nathan.
I also hope the best for you and for everyone else here in our
community. Hang in there, things will get better ...

-- 
Johan