

Apache Subversion to Migrate to Git - bigsassy
http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/svn-migrates-to-git

======
rst
Now _definitively_ an April Fool's joke.

Greg Stein's latest, and presumably last, comment on the JIRA ticket that
started this furore:
[https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedComm...](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedCommentId=13957226&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-
tabpanel#comment-13957226)

(ETA: they've also added "April Fools" to the title of the ticket itself.)

Quoting:

    
    
      ----------------------------------------------------
    

Resolving as "Not a problem". We sure as hell don't want to do this. :-)

My major thanks to [~jfarrell] for the concept.

And plenty of thanks to all of my co-conspirators on this issue. Yes.. even my
antagonist [~jimjag] was in on the ruse :-) … the Infra team handled this with
perfect aplomb. And the Directors and Exec Officers came in with a perfect
level of wrath. Our Subversion teammates showed a great sense of community and
circling the wagons… Thank you all for making this work!!!

Last but not least…

THANK YOU to all of you who actually BELIEVED.

~~~
yeukhon
At first I thought this was a serious thing even though I knew today is April
1st.

While I was believing the news, the second sentence caught my attention:

 _This will allow the development of the Subversion repository be developed
with Git_

O_o

~~~
rst
But that's already been possible for a good long while. They wouldn't be the
first people to find git-svn to be a better front end to Subversion than the
one that comes with Subversion itself :-).

~~~
yeukhon
Point is: if your _mature_ project itself is a VCS, it sounds contradicting to
use someone else's VCS to host your VCS :)

------
petercooper
Give it a year and the Apache Software Foundation's sites will be switching to
nginx.

~~~
colmmacc
Full disclosure: I'm an ASF member and one of the httpd developers and PMC
members.

We're actually planning an experimental migration to nginx as part of
Apachecon this coming weekend.

~~~
Yhippa
This has to be an April Fool's joke. Unless it's for legitimate competitive
intelligence :-)

------
StevePerkins
I'm STILL not convinced that this is a real story, and not an ongoing April
Fool's prank. We'll see later in the week.

However, even if it DOES turn out to be legit... how dumb would you have to be
to make any major announcement over the Internet on 4/1? Much less raise a
question, conduct only a few hours of discussion and polling, and then make
your final decision within a few hours... all on a day where most of the
people commenting on that Jira ticket probably thought they were participating
in a joke.

This is either the most well-played April Fool's joke since "OMG Ponies!!!",
or else the absolute dumbest thing I have ever seen Apache do.

~~~
stormbrew
Real announcements do happen on April 1st. See for example gmail [1], perhaps
one of the most important product announcements in the last decade.

Though I admit, I sometimes expect them to announce that it was a joke all
along and shut it down.

[1] [http://googlepress.blogspot.ca/2004/04/google-gets-
message-l...](http://googlepress.blogspot.ca/2004/04/google-gets-message-
launches-gmail.html)

------
peeters
I think tons of companies battle with the limitations of "we should eat our
own dog food." It tends to be a general rule, even when you as an organization
have only _marginal_ overlap with your target market.

I applaud Greg Stein's response (Stein is the founder and VP who was against
the move):

> The short of it is: the Apache Subversion project chose this. We want to get
> our stuff coded and released. For our backend, we don't need the super-huge
> repositories that Subversion supports. Our project stores some binaries, but
> we can make Git work for us. We have no need for Subversion's fine-grained
> authorization ... shoot. We allow ALL ASF committers access to our
> repository. There are no barriers to the migration here, and some of the
> stuff that Infra has done for integration with GitHub? Pretty cool.
> Positives, and only little negatives.

I love seeing this commitment to the community and developers.

 _Edit_ though for completeness on the whole "dogfood" issue, this is another
comment Stein made:

>So I'll be able to use the _svn_ client to check out from the ASF git repo?
Awesome. (...) We can dogfood svn against our own repo.

------
TallGuyShort
Unless the author actually has access to the private mailing list where the
vote supposedly took place, I still call BS. I believe this was a prank. I'm
familiar with many of the commenters on the JIRA and they were very much out
of their normal character.

------
impostervt
I really thought it was an April fools joke...

~~~
toggle
I read their Jira thread, and I was convinced it was a joke, too. The project
manager mentioned some poll that no one else had heard of, and then other
people kept coming up with reasons as to why it made sense to have had a short
poll for such a major issue. I just assumed they were stringing everyone else
along. :P

Honestly, if this _isn 't_ a joke, I think it doesn't really make SVN look bad
(or dead). SVN's remaining proponents keep arguing that it works well in a
corporate environment, while they agree that git is better for large, open-
source projects. Well, SVN is a large, open-source project.

I'm still betting it's a joke, though.

~~~
viraptor
I don't think it's a joke really. The ticket and a couple of comments would
look like one. But multiple project leaders commenting more than once and
(acting as if) getting quite annoyed with each other would be a massive waste
of time for the whole org on a joke that doesn't need to be this long.

At this point, I think it's real...

------
rabino
Yeah, it was a joke. [0]

A pretty long one at that.

[0]
[https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedComm...](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedCommentId=13957226&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-
tabpanel#comment-13957226)

------
grkvlt
I'm kind of confused at the people who thought this was an April Fool joke.
Really? If the announcement was on a news site or blog, maybe, but a 'Task'
issue on the INFRA JIRA is hardly the appropriate venue. Although, it seems
that @jimjag (the ASF director) was pretty pissed at the Subversion PMC and
lead [1] for making the decision without consulting the community, just taking
a vote from the committers.

Note that the _interesting part_ of this is the move to use Git as the _back
end storage engine_ for Subversion eventually, with 'svn' being just a client
API. The code is available now in the 'ra-git' branch. [2] Also, see @gstein's
comment to the committer, noting that using a Git repo for Subversion code
will simplify testing the new libsvn_ra_git client when it's available:

> So I'll be able to use the _svn_ client to check out from the ASF git repo?
> Awesome. [...] We can dogfood svn against our own repo. Thanks, Stefan

[1]
[https://twitter.com/jimjag/status/450999640583053312](https://twitter.com/jimjag/status/450999640583053312)
[2]
[http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=r1583639](http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=r1583639)

~~~
flebron
Well this is embarrassing.

~~~
grkvlt
Isn't it? But, well played to the Subversion guys, et al. Was absolutely taken
in... ;)

------
Maxious
Some interesting discussion going on in this ticket
[https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524)

~~~
clhodapp
This ticket is linked from the second word of the article. What does this
comment add to the discussion?

------
goshawk
I just think the PMC just figured out that they cannot compete with git and
it's services (github, anyone?) so they are just doing the most natural thing
to do using git. This is complemented with the ra_git upcoming release that
will enable better svn/git integration. Having a svn that is able to talk with
a git backend natively enables users to use tools designed for git also with
svn. Many everyday git users i know complain about the verbose workflow that
git imposes. Some of them even made scripts that mime svn update like behavior
using git stash/pull --rebase and other svn like commands. So svn could really
have a place being a git frontend with a simplified workflow

In short: may look silly, but in the long run i don't think it's a bad idea.

------
iLoch
I'm really surprised people thought this was serious. That's like RedHat
announcing that they're switching their servers to IIS.

------
chaosmonkey
Does this mean they won this year's April Fool's?
[https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedComm...](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedCommentId=13957226&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-
tabpanel#comment-13957226)

------
jonaldomo
I just put a doc together on how to migrate from svn to git on my blog at
[http://jmoses.co/2014/03/21/moving-from-svn-to-
git.html](http://jmoses.co/2014/03/21/moving-from-svn-to-git.html) for all who
is interested.

------
stevenspasbo
Well it was just closed as Not a Problem and "April Fools" was added to the
title.

------
mantrax4
A joke or not, this makes SVN look bad.

As a SVN user I don't appreciate the message here. Every piece of technology
is a platform that needs mindshare to survive. If it has no mindshare, it
might as well be an excellent piece of engineering, but it'll still disappear.

In a perfectly rational world, with perfect communication, and universal
understanding of everything, it wouldn't be a big deal - SVN and Git have
different best use cases.

But in our _real_ world, this action gives excellent bullets for the anti-SVN
people to use now in any discussion bringing Git vs. SVN.

~~~
to3m
I can't see this working out poorly for the pro-SVN people one way or the
other. If you'd probably be better off with git, you should use git - but svn
will certainly prove workable enough in the same situation. On the other hand,
if you'd be better off with svn, most likely due to its locking functionality,
by comparison git is very likely to prove painful enough to warrant a switch.

Ideally this will cement SVN's position in its niche. Most git users seem to
deny that this niche even exists, but I think it is there. I see SVN's more
natural competitor as Perforce (which currently beats SVN as handily as git
does, though from the opposite direction), but its maintainers seem not to be
bothering to take it on, presumably due to their perception of SVN's position
in the marketplace. Were they to admit that it's lost to git on what has
become git's home turf, which it seems that they're doing, perhaps this would
help focus attention elsewhere...

------
gvlamadrid
April Fools joke!!!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
But so good because so very, very plausible.

------
Dorian-Marie
If it is an April Joke, that would be ironic.

They think people would not take seriously, but as everybody knows, SVN is
increasly being replaced with Git and that doesn't seem illogic even for them
to use Git.

