James Gregory

Note: This is based on my personal experiences, and is not specifically “fact”. If your experiences differ, fine, but these are mine.

Subversion has started receiving some more flak in certain circles, it’s no longer in-vogue, no longer cool. Distributed version control is the big thing now, Git, Mecurial, Bazaar etc. Well I’m a huge Git fan, and I’m finding myself slowly transitioning away from Subversion project by project. However, I think I need to address something.

Subversion radically changed how people perceive source control, certainly in the environments that I’ve introduced it into (primarily SourceSafe based). That’s no small feat, and I don’t think it should be forgotten amid all the hype around newer source control systems.

The attitude towards source control prior to Subversion was that of fear; it was a black box that you threw your code into at the end of every day. Nobody really understood what it does, or why it does it, and even in some cases why they’re actually doing it. This was probably down to poor user interfaces, but nobody really wanted to use it, they just had to. It was never made a proper part of anyone’s workflow, apart from as a part of shutting down your machine at the end of the day (hopefully you remembered to do that!).

Then along came Subversion (sometimes with a bit of force), with it’s good tools, it’s stable repository, and it’s ease of management. You could host it through a webserver, everybody could access it via a URL. It never corrupts itself randomly, and it doesn’t require scary maintenance work.

With Subversion people stopped fearing source control, in fact they started enjoying it. People started deleting old code, entire swaths of code, because they were now happy that it was always going to be available. They actually made it a primary part of their workflow; multiple commits a day, regular history lookups, blame, branches, tags, the lot.

Maybe Subversion isn’t cool any more, but we shouldn’t forget what it did for many shops that adopted it.