Now <i>definitively</i> an April Fool's joke.<p>Greg Stein's latest, and presumably last, comment on the JIRA ticket that started this furore: <a href="https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedCommentId=13957226&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-13957226" rel="nofollow">https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedComm...</a><p>(ETA: they've also added "April Fools" to the title of the ticket itself.)<p>Quoting:<p><pre><code> ----------------------------------------------------
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Resolving as "Not a problem". We sure as hell don't want to do this. :-)<p>My major thanks to [~jfarrell] for the concept.<p>And plenty of thanks to all of my co-conspirators on this issue. Yes.. even my antagonist [~jimjag] was in on the ruse :-) … the Infra team handled this with perfect aplomb. And the Directors and Exec Officers came in with a perfect level of wrath. Our Subversion teammates showed a great sense of community and circling the wagons… Thank you all for making this work!!!<p>Last but not least…<p>THANK YOU to all of you who actually BELIEVED.
I'm STILL not convinced that this is a real story, and not an ongoing April Fool's prank. We'll see later in the week.<p>However, even if it DOES turn out to be legit... how dumb would you have to be to make any major announcement over the Internet on 4/1? Much less raise a question, conduct only a few hours of discussion and polling, and then make your final decision within a few hours... all on a day where most of the people commenting on that Jira ticket probably thought they were participating in a joke.<p>This is either the most well-played April Fool's joke since "OMG Ponies!!!", or else the absolute dumbest thing I have ever seen Apache do.
I think tons of companies battle with the limitations of "we should eat our own dog food." It tends to be a general rule, even when you as an organization have only <i>marginal</i> overlap with your target market.<p>I applaud Greg Stein's response (Stein is the founder and VP who was against the move):<p>> The short of it is: the Apache Subversion project chose this. We want to get our stuff coded and released. For our backend, we don't need the super-huge repositories that Subversion supports. Our project stores some binaries, but we can make Git work for us. We have no need for Subversion's fine-grained authorization ... shoot. We allow ALL ASF committers access to our repository. There are no barriers to the migration here, and some of the stuff that Infra has done for integration with GitHub? Pretty cool. Positives, and only little negatives.<p>I love seeing this commitment to the community and developers.<p><i>Edit</i> though for completeness on the whole "dogfood" issue, this is another comment Stein made:<p>>So I'll be able to use the <i>svn</i> client to check out from the ASF git repo? Awesome. (...) We can dogfood svn against our own repo.
Unless the author actually has access to the private mailing list where the vote supposedly took place, I still call BS. I believe this was a prank. I'm familiar with many of the commenters on the JIRA and they were very much out of their normal character.
Yeah, it was a joke. [0]<p>A pretty long one at that.<p>[0] <a href="https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedCommentId=13957226&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-13957226" rel="nofollow">https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedComm...</a>
I'm kind of confused at the people who thought this was an April Fool joke. Really? If the announcement was on a news site or blog, maybe, but a 'Task' issue on the INFRA JIRA is hardly the appropriate venue. Although, it seems that @jimjag (the ASF director) was pretty pissed at the Subversion PMC and lead [1] for making the decision without consulting the community, just taking a vote from the committers.<p>Note that the <i>interesting part</i> of this is the move to use Git as the <i>back end storage engine</i> for Subversion eventually, with 'svn' being just a client API. The code is available now in the 'ra-git' branch. [2] Also, see @gstein's comment to the committer, noting that using a Git repo for Subversion code will simplify testing the new libsvn_ra_git client when it's available:<p>> So I'll be able to use the <i>svn</i> client to check out from the ASF git repo? Awesome. [...] We can dogfood svn against our own repo. Thanks, Stefan<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/jimjag/status/450999640583053312" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jimjag/status/450999640583053312</a>
[2] <a href="http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=r1583639" rel="nofollow">http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=r1583639</a>
Some interesting discussion going on in this ticket <a href="https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524" rel="nofollow">https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524</a>
I just think the PMC just figured out that they cannot compete with git and it's services (github, anyone?) so they are just doing the most natural thing to do using git.
This is complemented with the ra_git upcoming release that will enable better svn/git integration. Having a svn that is able to talk with a git backend natively enables users to use tools designed for git also with svn.
Many everyday git users i know complain about the verbose workflow that git imposes. Some of them even made scripts that mime svn update like behavior using git stash/pull --rebase and other svn like commands.
So svn could really have a place being a git frontend with a simplified workflow<p>In short: may look silly, but in the long run i don't think it's a bad idea.
Does this mean they won this year's April Fool's?
<a href="https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedCommentId=13957226&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-13957226" rel="nofollow">https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedComm...</a>
I just put a doc together on how to migrate from svn to git on my blog at <a href="http://jmoses.co/2014/03/21/moving-from-svn-to-git.html" rel="nofollow">http://jmoses.co/2014/03/21/moving-from-svn-to-git.html</a> for all who is interested.
A joke or not, this makes SVN look bad.<p>As a SVN user I don't appreciate the message here. Every piece of technology is a platform that needs mindshare to survive. If it has no mindshare, it might as well be an excellent piece of engineering, but it'll still disappear.<p>In a perfectly rational world, with perfect communication, and universal understanding of everything, it wouldn't be a big deal - SVN and Git have different best use cases.<p>But in our <i>real</i> world, this action gives excellent bullets for the anti-SVN people to use now in any discussion bringing Git vs. SVN.
If it is an April Joke, that would be ironic.<p>They think people would not take seriously, but as everybody knows, SVN is increasly being replaced with Git and that doesn't seem illogic even for them to use Git.