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Re: Suggestion to change the name "Subversion"

From: Greg Stein <gstein_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 20:51:37 +0000

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 09:41:03AM -0400, Andy Levy wrote:
>...
> probably suggested it for git as well. And isn't there a (possibly
> apocryphal) story about the "blame" (either in CVS or SVN) being
> aliased to "annotate" and "praise" because a manager somewhere didn't
> like the negative connotation of "blame"?

Nope. No managers involved. We just thought it would be funny, and in
a touchy-feely way to make Subversion more "positive". You "praise"
people's changes, rather than "blame" them :-)

[ and note: CVS has "annotate"; "blame" came from Mozilla's web-based
  repository viewer (MXR?) ]

> That said, I agree with everyone here, changing the name on a
> 13-year-old project is not necessary. I'm sure the name and its
> spelling was considered thoroughly before it was selected.

Apache Subversion actually started as "Inversion" around December
1999, or January 2000. It wasn't until April 2000, that we accepted
"Subversion" as a rename. It had "version" in the name, and we *were*
trying to subvert the CVS installations/community, so the name fit
extremely well :-)

It became "Apache Subversion" in February 2010.

Cheers,
-g
Received on 2013-08-12 22:51:44 CEST

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