Re: [TSVN] Politics of SVN

JS.staff wrote:
> That's really sad, they need their butts kicking!!! All the more reason to mobilize a Windows user action group!

If you are serious about raising the profile of Windows users on the Subversion mailing lists you
had better spend a long time looking through the mailing list archives. If you try to restart a
previous discussion you will quite reasonably be ignored. If you start a thread on the '.svn' issue
I swear you will be able to hear the groans of the mailing list readers around the globe.

I am a Windows user and I read all the Subversion lists and I am afraid that my take on the
Subversion and the Windows platform thing is very different from others on this list. I really
don't believe that the Subversion project is unreasonable with regard to the Windows platform.
There is a long running thread at the moment on how to fix a serious performance regression in 1.1
on Windows and the consensus is that even though it is hard to fix it should be done prior to a 1.1
release. Yes, there are some unresolved issues. The '.svn' vs. '_svn' is one of them, however
there are clients available for Windows which are built for _svn. This is fixed by MS in their next
VS.NET release and therefore will become a non-issue.

The root of the problem is that wherever possible Windows does things in a different way from other
platforms. This makes creating a truly cross platform product harder than it should be. Then there
is the whole dll hell thing, I happen to agree with SteveKing on this issue, but there is no obvious
solution so it hasn't really been resolved.

The Subversion team are continually thinking about how a change affects all platforms and the long
term maintainability. See the CVS code base for the long term consequences of not doing this!

If you do want to make a positive contribution you have to be prepared to do some work, make
reasoned proposals having looked at previous threads on the lists and considered *all* platforms and
discuss the issue sensibly on the mailing list.

Also bear in mind that Subversion is relatively new and there are still a lot of features which need
to be added and therefore all the developers a busy working on these features.

Plus, Subversion actually works very well on Windows. Nearly all the issues can be worked around or
avoided.

-- 
Martin Tomes
echo 'martin at tomes x org x uk'\
  | sed -e 's/ x /\./g' -e 's/ at /@/'
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