On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 11:04:53AM +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > I agree, dpatch & co seem to be more accessible: they are files you
> > can "touch"; they're not an abstract concept ("branch") which you
> > can work with, but which is not tangible.
> This is another possible reason for SVN's success: branches are
> directories, which are a reasonably widespread concept among Unix
> developers. In fact, SVN is what looks the most closely to a distributed
> and versioned filesystem, which is how most packaging teams use it.
While I agree this is a nice feature of svn, I don't think it's a reason
for SVN's success. It is true that when you really need to work with
branches and tags, doing it the svn way is ages more comfortable than
the cvs way, but is still a burden.
In my packaging experiences with collaborative maintenance on svn we use
tags (a lot!) as history of changes and just because svn-buildpackages
create tags automatically. We use branches for experimental changes,
usually accompanying "aggressive" proposals to the whole team, playing
the role of proof of concepts implementation. But that's it, we would
have used cvs the same way.
The real reason of svn success is that it is cvs done right. A workflow
a lot of people is already familiar with, which tons of nuisance (but
not all of them) less than cvs.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy
zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. -!-
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