Talk:Apache Subversion

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Server down?

Is it just me or has the main site (http://subversion.tigris.org/) been down for 3-4 days! It would be nice to have a site status section or subversion latest news...?

--Cribe 13:44, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I can get it fine. As for status and news, Wikipedia is not a news site. Imroy 18:35, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Latest version

Should there be a latest version section, or a mention of it somewhere? --Turnstep 15:56, July 29, 2005 (UTC)

I think we might as well just stick to major revsions. The article already contains information about the major revisions with release dates ie. 1, 1.1 and 1.2 which should be enough. Keeping track of minor version releases would add too much extra work and could easy become out of date. --User:Polymorp

Weblink addition

The "Subversion - a better CVS" link to http://www.linux.ie/articles/subversion/ is based on a pre 1.0 version so aspects such as reliablity/issues have been improved greatly since the article was written. A similar, more recently article would be a better choice if we can find one.

History

Can someone add a history section? If you speak German, maybe you can use de:Subversion (Software)#Geschichte for your reference. -- Felix Wiemann 09:24, 3 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Criticism

Shouldn't we add a Criticism section (like Concurrent_Versions_System#Limitations)?

I think it can be split in 2: one for things that are against its philosophy (like decentralized repositories), and other for things that could fit its philosophy but are absent for one reason or another.

I would add it myself, if I wasn't still using CVS... :-) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.146.125.49 (talk • contribs)

195.5.138.42 (talk · contribs) tried adding a criticism section, but I removed it because I found it quite POV. In particular, it suggested a single commercial system as an "alternative" because of scalability issues. I wouldn't mind some sort of criticism or "current issues" section. Just remember that Subversion is still quite new and undergoing constant development. Any problems or issues may soon be addressed in a later release. And try to keep it NPOV. Imroy 06:02, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Expansion

I feel that the bullet points alone can be expanded into entire subsections. :-) —Rob (talk) 16:06, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly which points are you referring to? There's a few sections with bulleted lists. Imroy 16:54, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, completely missed that. I was referring to the CSV comparison section, as SVN's origins can be traced directly to CSV and its perceived inferior points. —Rob (talk) 17:04, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think Rob means to say CVS in terms of asking for a comparison. Fraterm 00:29, 9 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

External link cleanup

Ok, I've just gone through and removed a bunch of links. One was a duplicated link to the Eclipse plugin. There were a bunch of blogs which didn't say much, and some old (2004) articles. I also removed the versioned links to the 'svnbook' - just link to the home page. Dmoz and the 'svnbook' are probably enough for most people to get started. We don't need a dozen highly specific "Howto" blog links. Imroy 16:54, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I understand your reasons for removing the links you did, but could you be more civil about it next time with respect to your edit summaries. Ans e ll 22:54, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What?

I've read this article twice and have no idea what this thing is. The intro to this article currently reads: "Subversion is an open source application for revision control. Also commonly referred to as svn or SVN, Subversion is designed specifically to be a modern replacement for CVS and shares a number of the same key developers." Could this be dumbed down a bit? The only way to decode this jargon is to click on the links to "revision control" and "CVS." "Key developers" doesn't even have a link. I flatter myself that I know what open source is already, but don't get how it applies here. I think the average reader should be able to understand the subject of an article without clicking on links - their purpose is for additional information, not basic lucidity. I don't mean to criticize, and I hope you will appreciate the perspective of a non-techie. CClio333 01:34, 23 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I concur. I have a basic idea what version control is, but beyond the first paragraph everything is jibberish. This article is clearly written for experts, i.e. people who are using cvs and persuaded to switch to svn. Anton 24.201.100.166 15:16, 25 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Or fanboys who never thought to make it readable by normal people. Being Wikipedia, I'd take that bet. But yeah, everything after the intro needs rewritten. Chris Cunningham 13:25, 26 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I concur. I am a developer who uses subversion every day and I must say that this article is too long, too technical and very un-encylopedic. I propose that the vast majority of it should just be deleted concerning all its features and branching abilities. Kingmundi 21:32, 23 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Key Benefits (Marketing Speak?)

The list of "Key Benefits" contains vague words that can't be quantified. It sounds more like what might be seen on a product box rather than what should be in an encyclopedia.

For example: "Low IT infrastructure requirements (servers and bandwidth)" - compared to what? "Minimal training costs" - Need a comparison of another system's training costs. "Rich feature set" - More or less rich than similar products? And does "rich" mean there are more features, or the same number of features but with higher quality? "Robust" - Does that mean it doesn't crash often? If that's the case, what data is there to say it's anymore robust than CVS or any other versioning system?

There's a lot of other content on the page I think needs improving to provide a neutral point of view. Raisenero 11:19, 26 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You are stating it is a key benefit, that version history is retained across renames, and further below you state "Subversion currently implements the renaming of files and directories as a 'copy' to the new name followed by a 'delete' of the old name." Which of both is correct? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.56.169.253 (talk) 17:28, 17 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

CollabNet is the Developer???

My understanding is that CollabNet were one of the original sponsors of the Subversion project, and yes they provide hosting for the project, and yes a *few* of the developers still work for CollabNet BUT:

- Most of the developers on the project (those with a commercial interest) work for Google, not CollabNet [1]

- It is one of the few truly successful "Open Source" projects, so the developers *are* the community?

Therefore should "Developer" not be contributed back to the community that actually contributes to the project? 85.210.36.63 13:24, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Meh. "CollabNet plus community", then. svn is fairly unusual in having been planned and developed by a company as an open project from scratch, so I think it's worth keeping them noted. Chris Cunningham 13:35, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

General Explanation/Description

I've come to this page knowing nothing about subversion and wanted to understand what it does in a general sense and have left knowing no more than when I came. Please include a general description section to bring noobs up to speed. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.16.58.72 (talk • contribs).

I am in the same position! What on earth is this thing? Could someone please write an introduction that actually explains what this is about? 86.138.122.214 16:14, 29 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is somehow normal that it is a bit less understandable to non-developers. In any case, the leading sentence leads directly to revision control. Are you sure your criticism doesn't apply to the latter, rather than to this article? —Gennaro Prota ^•Talk 16:54, 29 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No source given: claim that it shares a number of key developers with CVS

"Subversion is designed specifically to be a modern replacement for CVS and shares a number of the same key developers."

Got a source for that? I see the CVS Authors list: cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/cvs/ccvs/AUTHORS?view=auto and the SVN committers list: svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/COMMITTERS and didn't find any overlap among the core. (I can't make the above http links because the spam test is inaccessible.) 86.53.37.59 13:45, 16 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

One author in common is mentioned on www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/1438 - who else? 86.53.37.59 17:24, 16 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Costs

Costs are proportional to change size, not data size. Which size is meant here? --Abdull 08:28, 27 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Official pronunciation

Is Subversion pronounced with the stress on the first syllable or, as if it came from the verb "to subvert", the second? Robert K S

I'm pretty sure it's pronounced like the English word "subversion", with the emphasis on the second syllable. It'd be pretty obtuse to demand otherwise. Chris Cunningham 15:57, 28 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Binaries Section

The "binaries" section has been tagged for some time as an unencyclopedic advertising board for software projects. This doesn't belong on this article, and I don't even think it warrants a list of projects related to Subversion article. If it doesn't get better soon I'm going to remove it again. Chris Cunningham 10:01, 8 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Five days and the only contribution has been to (surprise!) tack yet another link on. Removing again. Chris Cunningham 11:02, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I can understand eliminating the "related" products and the IDEs which just happen to have Subversion integration. I do disagree with removing the links for Subversion binaries (especially the official sites) and Subversion clients. When I implemented Subversion for the first time earlier this year, the Wiki page for Subversion was my starting point for researching clients available for the product. Before removing so much from the article you really should have discussed what parts of the content were inappropriate rather than just saying the equivalent of "if someone else doesn't fix it I'm going to remove it". --StuffOfInterest 11:57, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The list was tagged for some time, and it had become obvious that (like all other lists on Wikipedia) it was encouraging people to tack things on for the sake of completion. I can see the point in including a small section on CollabNet's distribution policy (though such a thing isn't particularly common to WP articles) but not a list of clients; wikipedia isn't a product guide. There are better places to list SVN clients, places where unsourced commentary is not only permitted but encouraged. I'd rather that this article concentrated on describing SVN itself. Chris Cunningham 14:16, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This content has been there for a long time before recently getting removed. I think it is very useful information, although I could understand why others might not want in inside this article. Don't destroy several years of work without moving this list to it's own page or something like that. Thumperwad has been simply deleting the results of several years of edits. Cshay 21:59, 22 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Move it to its own page if you want, though it's no more encyclopedic than list of countries with KFC restaurants and would probably suffer the same fate. I've followed procedure in taking this to talk. Don't use obviously self-perpetuating non-justifications like "it's been here a long time" to defend keeping it in this article. Chris Cunningham 08:57, 23 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I just ask you why this material has been in this article for more than a year if it was unwanted? I found it very useful. 71.198.35.219 09:14, 23 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Chris, I didn't realize until a few seconds ago that you were Thumperwad, hence my recent revert. If we move this to a new page, what is the best way to do so and give it the best chance of surviving a RFD? Anyway, feel free to move it, and add a link to the new page in it's place but I don't think the information should be outright deleted from wikipedia. Cshay 09:21, 23 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It's ward with an R, not that it matters. The best way to ensure it survives an AfD is to transform it into useful, relevant prose. However, if this was ever going to have happened, it would have happened before this point. Tagging the article didn't help. Removing the list didn't help. This is listcruft, and nobody is interested in improving it. Feel free to work on software which uses Subversion, the new sub-article. Chris Cunningham 10:03, 23 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Uncertainty of Subversion popularity

The claim is made that "Subversion has replaced CVS as the most popular VCS used in open source projects." yet I'm not sure if the reference provided is a good representation of the open source community as a whole. The statistics given are dependent on a project being registered with the site. From personal experience I know Subversions *is* a popular alternative to CVS in open source projects, but I can't say from that same experience that it is *more* popular than CVS in the open source world. Personally, it's seemed about even when searching sourceforge.net for software.

Also the statement feels like it slightly limits the scope of the article by implicitly associating Subversion with open source projects as opposed to *any* project (open or otherwise) as no statistics are given concerning closed software (nor would it be likely that they could).

I suggest this statement be replaced with "Subversion is currently a popular VCS alternative to CVS, particularly among many open source projects." as this statement is a little more neutral by not qualifying Subversion's popularity. Also, it is less susceptible to becoming out of date as statistics could shift significantly. If they do, this alternate statement would still be sound as long as a significant percentage of projects used Subversion. Also, this way, the reference link can be kept in place to reinforce the new statement. MerlinYoda 16:47, 27 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've applied my suggestion due to a lack of any feedback against it. MerlinYoda 17:05, 8 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]