alt Hacker NewsI still have nightmares from my first dev gig. We used SVN, which even in 2015 was prehistoric technology. The server was some awful rustbucket that couldn't sustain 100Mbit. Yes, it couldn't saturate basic 100megabit Ethernet. Everyone had to have big drives in their workstations to maintain multiple local trees. You just couldn't work otherwise.
But probably the worst part was that when I started it was a loose organization where anyone could sneakily merge something into trunk. That changed quickly.
All work was done against a develop branch, and every two weeks, the admin would DELETE THE TRUNK and recreate it from a COPY of develop.
Every two weeks, we lost all history and context for changes in any given release. This was an effort to stop bugs coming back in merge regressions.
Can you guess how well this worked out for them?
Replies
Deleting the trunk every two weeks physically hurts to read.
I'm always surprised by how popular SVN still is though. I ported my old Sublime SVN plugin to VS Code years ago for fun, and I still get issues raised today (usually in Chinese, so it seems popular there). If you look at the VS Code marketplace, the top SVN extension has ~1.3m installs.
Bit of a tangent, but it probably wasn't a good idea to release an extension for something I had stopped using long before, particularly when you have to maintain it!
That sounds like trunk-based development with extra steps (and only a single release branch that gets wiped every 2 weeks).
I kinda love SVN, it was a leap up from many popular solutions at the time.
And some people hate it… but, up to and including this story of random-assed deletions, scratch the surface of why and all you hear are self-inflicted harm through bad process.
“Git sucks butt because at OUR shop we start a new repo every few weeks with copy n paste and don’t understand partial checkouts and under-resource the primary host server and also people sneak code into production for funsies.”… … yeah, sounds like “Git” has problems…