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Subversion Project Migrates To Git
New submitter gitficionado (3600283) writes "The Apache Subversion project has begun migrating its source code from the ASF Subversion repo to git. Last week, the Subversion PMC (project management committee) voted to migrate, and the migration has already begun. Although there was strong opposition to the move from the older and more conservative SVN devs, and reportedly a lot of grumbling and ranting when the vote was tallied, a member of the PMC (who asked to remain anonymous) told the author that 'this [migration] will finally let us get rid of the current broken design to a decentralized source control model [and we'll get] merge and rename done right after all this time.'"
Source for the new git backend.
In related news, Microsoft will be using Gmail for their company email, and Apple will be replacing their workstations with Linux boxes.
haha. april fools
No really. What?
Subversion is really a joke. Gotcha!
See, what they've done here is concocted and published an implausible story (or in this case, tracking issue) that is designed to misdirect, nay, fool people into believing it is real. These jolly japesters have done this in the full knowledge that it will mislead people into believing it to be true, and they have chosen to do it today, on the very first day of April, as is customary in these matters.
Oh Apache and Slashdot, you are truly such ruse masters!
Seriously, April 1st is such a fucking bag of shit. Just fucking stop.
This would probably be a good idea for the future of subversion.
.
I've got to admit. The discussion going on in that ticket is pretty convincing, leading me to think that either:
a) legit
b) they sucked in a lot of their own people
c) really well thought out
I'm thinking (and hoping) b, with c as an unlikely but possible second.
Really?
The righteous indignation from those responding to the post in the link above is actually funnier than the post itself.
I look forward to rename finally working properly. Thanks, SVN guys!
Apple is BSD
...as wishful thinking I am guessing.
slashdot fails at april fools every year. at least you didn't force us to beta as a joke.
'this [migration] will finally let us get rid of the current broken design... ... and replace it with a completely new broken design. (I hate git.)
Not as bad as some of the jokes in years past.
... when Slashdot posted nothing but joke stories all day on April 1; it was the best way to catch all of them. Maybe they decided they couldn't top themselves after OMG PONIES!!!!! (which I missed), but just sticking in one joke stories amongst a bunch of uninteresting real ones is lame. There isn't even an article on the Google prank!
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
It's a day for laughter
When Mickey$oft first bought Hotmail in 1997, and for many years after, it was running Qmail, on FreeBSD, and Solaris computers! (See also, Qmail.org)
IMHO, it hasn't worked as well since they moved it to their own software! ;^)
The "joke" is on Mickey$oft! ;^)
Nah, they're just lumping April 1 and April 20 into one event: an Easter Egg hunt for April Fool's jokes.
Better known as 318230.
and CVS migrates to RCS supported by front end in Gopher, a backend in TFTP with all discussions held over usenet using the pine news reader. If everyone would just remember to update the damn version numbers.
Now if git could migrate its source code to SVN that would be great.
Apple already makes use of vast numbers of Linux workstations. That office, of course, goes by the name Pixar.
If the conclusion is the SVN backend sucks, the GIT front-end sucks more. I'm fine with an SVN interface to GIT. It's about time!
I thought Pixar was part of Disney, though last time I checked, the Jobs estate was a huge shareholder in both Apple and Disney.
LOL
(Technically, as Git is SVN compatible, so you could get this effect simply by using Git 'locally'.)
git2svn has a problem that we ran into recently: because git does not support hierarchical branching, if you do not keep all your branches in a single Subversion directory, it will take an excessively long time for a local git repository to synchronize with a Subversion repository.
For example, let's say that you have the typical /branches directory in Subversion. Now user "myria" comes along, and she wants to make her own directory of branches so that her own branches don't pollute the /branches directory. She does an svn copy of /trunk to /branches/myria/new-crypto. Now git2svn tries to import this change from Subversion into a local git repository and takes three hours. Why?
Because git doesn't support hierarchical branch names, from git's naive perspective, what Myria has done is make a copy of the entire repository into a new directory named "new-crypto" inside of her "myria" branch. Git does not interpret her commit as a creation of a branch - it sees "myria" as the branch, and "new-crypto" as merely a directory within the branch. Subversion gives no special meaning to the directory named "branches", so git2svn is simply using a hack of assuming that the "branches" directory contains objects that it can convert into git's branch objects. Git thus sees her commit as one giant commit of 100,000 files, and consequently takes forever processing it.
The above was a recently-encountered real-life situation at the office from about two weeks ago.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
They have the same fields of application, just one is vastly superior to the other.
svn does not actually have branches. What it has is a copy of one subdirectory to another. It also therefore, does not have merges. What it has instead is a diff/patch of all of the changes in the copy directory back to the original, squashing all of that history into one big patch that almost always has conflicts that are a pain to disentangle, and future blames show all of the changes as being done at the same time, typically with a simple change log entry that only says "merge blah". It also does not have tags. Again, it uses a copy for this purpose. This means you can indadvertanly add commits onto a tag, and noticing that and realizing that those commits are missing from the branch that was tagged is not easy.
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git is as vastly superior to svn as svn was to cvs. Each makes the previous look like the pile of crap it is. Some things that make git a godsend over svn are:
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1) The ability to make several simple fixes, commit each one separately, then test, go back and fix up some mistakes you made the first round, test again, then decide to push the *correct* changes. With svn you usually end up with a single commit that has several small, but not really related changes in it, that are not documented well, which makes it really difficult to cherry pick those changes to another branch.
[]
2) The ability to rebase branches. This means you can create a feature branch, hack on it while development continues on the main branch, then rebase your new feature patches onto the current master to stay up to date, and either merge or continue hacking. With svn you end up getting way out of sync from the main branch on long lived feature branches, and then when you try to merge, you have a massive pile of entangled conflicts to sort out.
It's almost never funny. At best it's a groan. Usually it's just stupid and dumb.
Yes, every April Fools's Day joke just makes the world's collective IQ lower. I feel dumber for being alive on this day.
Mod GP up for being awesomely cranky about a stupid thing.
Everybody in that issue, except for three, .. were part of our coordinated effort. Two people threw in comments that we had to delete (and if you look closely, are in the history). The third was likely aware, and his several comments supported our ruse, so they remained.
Our various tweets, including the two from @TheASF were (of course) coordinated along with the movement on the issue.
It was about a dozen of us, spanning around 14 hours. Many April Fool's pranks are "fire and forget". Keeping it *live* was our key. Many people, many voices, and many hours.
Hope you enjoyed :-)
The best thing about April 2 is that all those fucking stupid joke stories start to scroll off of the site.
The worst thing about April 2 is that those fucking stupid joke stories haven't yet fully scrolled off of the site.
I would REALLY love for Slashdot to have a new option: hide April 1 joke stories.
Literally, every opinion you offered about Git and Subversion was so far off the mark that I wonder if you've ever used either at all. If you have, then you clearly didn't make any effort to understand them.
The “local repo structure” you mention isn't complex—it's remarkably simple and solves real world problems. A few benefits of distributed version control is you get to have your commits without necessarily informing the team at large (offline commits), and the theory behind the design ultimately allows for simpler, less error-prone merging. Your “complex situations” are immensely powerful when working in groups (such as the ability to stash), but they do not get in your way. If you want to use only its most rudimentary features, Git is no more complicated than Subversion.
Then you really go off the rails with this idea that Git's hard because, as you explain, you had to “install the full development chain in order to rebuild the client because the one already installed is incompatible.” That's utterly bizarre. If you exerted even the very least amount of effort, you'd have realized there are current binaries for every platform—and packages for every system from RPM to Homebrew. You evidently haven't used Subversion all that long. There have been breaking changes between every minor release.
If you take the hardest possible road to any destination, don't blame the road. Blame your laziness and bad judgement.