From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2007-03-13T04:48:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Why SVN?

On 3/12/07, Trans <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:
> Should I be using SVN rather than Darcs or Git?
>
> Subversion has apparently become the version control system of choice
> for Ruby developers --especially now that Ruby itself uses it. I
> suspect that might have a lot to do with Rails and Rubyforge. Ruby
> only switched over to SVN well after Rails had been using it.

SVN is very much like CVS. It does have better handling of the
hierarchical structure of a project in that it versions the directory
hierarchy.  This makes it nicer for things like Rails which make a
fair use of directory hierarchies.

> And
> Rubyforge currently only supports SVN and CVS, which I find a bit
> surprising since, from what I understand, supporting Darcs is just a
> matter of having Darcs installed. And I can't imagine Git is much
> different.

I think it's a matter of the repository itself, they'd need to have
more parallel copies of the code in different repository formats.


>
> So I'm wondering, what's so special about SVN as opposed to the other
> choices? Is it because SVN is more like CVS than the other choices?
> The fact that SVN isn't distributed I would think would work against
> it (though I hear SVK is supposed to deal with that). Darcs is written
> in Haskell, and from the word on the street a lot of Ruby folk seem to
> like Haskell. Also, Git was written by Linus Torvalds, which is about
> as good as credentials can get.

A good bit of it is the relationship between CVS and SVN, if you are
used to CVS then SVN is a fairly easy transition.  Those two are
probably the most popular version systems around, so it's also a
matter of market share.

Git was written as a recovery from having the BitKeeper license yanked
out from under the linux project. FWIW.

-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/