
My Secret Shame, I Still Use Subversion - fogus
http://wordaligned.org/articles/steady-on-subversion
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a2tech
There's no shame in using a tool that works for you.

Also thanks for the tip on TortoiseSVN integrating with Word's diff tool-thats
an amazingly useful feature.

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lupin_sansei
Subversion? Shame? I still use Visual SourceSafe.

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weaksauce
I upvoted you just for the sheer brazenness of it all. Seriously though, why?
SVN won't corrupt the database and is much easier to branch/merge than
sourcesafe.

That being said I don't think there is anything "wrong" with using SVN.
(source safe was terrible in anything other than checking out the latest code
the last time I had to use it for a job.)

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lupin_sansei
I'm still using VSS as it's been 7 years and counting with no problems and I
guess I'm feeling like "if it aint broke don't fix it". I'm aware that many
people have corruption issues with VSS, so I do hourly backups, but almost a
decade in it's been good enough for me not to care too much about looking for
a new source control system.

Also there is a new version of VSS for Visual Studio 2005 (VSS 2005) that
seems to have fixed some issues that some people have had.

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weaksauce
If you are not opposed to closed source stuff you should have a look at
Vault(1). I migrated us over at the job that used VSS and it was a better
experience. Tight integration with visual studio and works similar to VSS
without all the corruption, non atomic commits, etc.

Whatever road you choose make sure to back it up because no system is
infallible. (see the snow leopard user destroying data bug if you need to
remind yourself of that.)

1\. <http://www.sourcegear.com/vault/>

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lupin_sansei
Yep I'm doing hourly backups, plus weekly backups stored offsite.

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krallja
In this article, Thomas Guest suffers from the blub paradox.

"What do I like most? The command to revert a change. Merge it backwards.

$ svn merge --change -666"

This is like lupin_sansei writing an article about how much he loves that the
command to edit a file in Visual SourceSafe is "check out." It's broken, and
doesn't need to be that way. In mercurial, for instance, the command is called
hg backout!

I celebrate the fact that Mr. Guest at least uses version control at work, and
Subversion is fine. However, the comfort working with it is the feeling of
stagnancy in personal growth.

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steve19
What is the git equivalent?

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jpcx01
Maybe people react differently to it, but git has been my #1 productivity
booster that I can remember. Combined with github, it's revolutionized the way
open source projects work.

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uuilly
Why the shame? svn works. I know git now, but it's been a two month headache.

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brazzy
The shame's for being old-fashioned. DVCS is all the rage nowadays, all the
cool kids are blogging about how great git is, the nonconformists argue with
them that mercurial is better, and you sit alone in the cafeteria corner and
daren't mention you still use something as uncool as SVN...

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jamesbritt
" and you sit alone in the cafeteria corner and daren't mention you still use
something as uncool as SVN..."

Or you go looking for that guy still using cvs and rank on _his_ lack of cool.

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3pt14159
A secret shame would be how I used to work in 2001. No source control
whatsoever. awesome_flat_file_to_ms_sql_converter21_1.asp _shudder_

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avinashv
Until about 18 months ago my source control was a bash file that would create
a time-stamped backup of specific hard-coded folders into /usr/sourcebackups.
Just a mkdir, name the folder, copy everything as it is. This was run as a
cron every midnight.

Not terribly proud of this. "Secret shame" is a pretty good way to describe
it.

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brazzy
Bah. I started using SVN for personal projects only about 2 months ago, and
before that, my source control was "time-stamped ZIP archive created manually
whenever I feel like it"

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avinashv
Haha good one-up. I recall doing that quite a few years ago, though I doubt I
ever wrote a project longer than 500 LoC back in those days.

One thing I found was the first few weeks of using a VCS I felt I was less
productive and that the extra work wasn't worth it. I now see the benefits and
am OK with the time sink of managing a repository, but do you find that for
personal projects it's not worth the hassle for you at this point?

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brazzy
Not really - setting up the repository and getting the old projects into it
was a bit of a hassle (actually much more the latter than the former, and
mainly due to SVN behaving strangely with ignored files), but using it is
hardly any additional work. I haven't really done much to use the capabilities
either, but it just feels good to know that due to checking in frequently, I
never have to worry about breaking something that was already working.

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tolmasky
I've liked git for a while, but github really did it for me. As far as I'm
concerned, they're one unit. Open source repos used to be such awful places:
most of them seemed like little better than just hitting a directory listing
for a web page. Github truly took most of the power of dvcs and made it
accessible through the web. I _want_ to fork things and try out a quick change
because its just so easy. This is of course thanks to git as its underpinnings
-- again, they are inseparable in my mind.

Also, we used to use SVK to do the stuff git has built in, for that alone I
would never switch back.

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dan_sim
We have projects on git and other on SVN and we prefer SVN. It may be a pain
in the ass sometimes but it just works. Git is too complicated when all you
want is a source-control for a team of two. But, every of our new projects are
on git now... in part because of github...

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InclinedPlane
Have you tried Mercurial? I find it to have all the benefits of Git with a
better interface and better documentation.

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dan_sim
I thought about it but I don't want to change yet another time and use 3
different source-control...

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mattmcknight
I'm sticking with Subversion, for now. I tend to work on team projects, not
open source, and we tend to collaborate quite frequently, making frequent
commits. It seems like many of the advantages of DVCS are being able to
achieve private branches without using the server. I kind of like having the
copy on the server.

I like the idea of local history, and the implementation in RubyMine is pretty
spectacular. Just adding that feature into Subversion would probably keep me
off of DVCS for a while longer.

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brown9-2
Antiquated? Wikipedia says svn is only 10 years old. CVS is almost 20 years
old!

(And yet somehow, my place of employment, which is only a few years old, chose
to use CVS and not SVN...)

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dlsspy
It'd be interesting to see that subversion graph vs. a git one. I don't know
how to find all git repos on the planet, but github is claiming 1,000 new
repositories per day last month:

<http://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace>

That's not quite the same as svn repository servers, but you can't ignore the
other side is growing madly, too.

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brown9-2
Eh, new accounts isn't really a great metric - would be more interesting to
see how many of those repositories remain active over time.

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dlsspy
New accounts is ~400 day, new repos is 1,000.

I get your point. But I don't think number of web servers out there capable of
also being subversion repositories is the greatest metric, either.

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brianto2010
Just be glad you _are_ using a VCS. I know many people who still don't use a
VCS when coding (and I don't regularly use any either).

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there
i still use cvs and i have no shame in that. it does what i need, i've never
had major issues with it, and i've managed large, multi-user and small,
single-user codebases with it.

i've had to use git and subversion to work with external projects and the one
thing i noticed with both was that 99% of the time i didn't use any of the
fancy features they claimed to support that cvs didn't.

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michaelcampbell
Does anyone use SCCS anymore?

