|
This article is a result of my visit to Subconf in Munich a couple of weeks
ago.
The first thing to say is that Subconf was very enjoyable and interesting and
my compliments to the organisers. There were some excellent speakers and it was
good to chat to various vendors too. I also had a very good time at the dinner
that evening - the only slight fly in the ointment was the S-Bahn strike the
following morning which meant a rather earlier taxi to the airport than I might
have wished!
The two keynotes by Brian Behlendorf and Karl Fogel respectively were
particularly good. Indeed it was good to get them at the conference since both
guys seem to be scaling down their Subversion involvement - Brian has stepped down as CTO
at Collabnet and Karl is running QuestionCopyright.org (although remains as
President of Subversion Corporation.
Some of the slides are now
available online.
Brian's Keynote
Brian mentioned his involvement in Apache and some of the lessons learnt
about creating a community that worked. These lessons were then applied by
Collab.net to get Subversion going. If you create a high quality community, you
will create high quality software.
- Need to be nice to people to avoid a "fork" - Development leaders
exhibit good communication skills, and can bring different ideas together.
- Conscious effort to bring new developers along the path: from
“consumers”, to bug reporters, to patch submitters, to active contributors.
Brian was asked the question in his talk about Linus's somewhat inflammatory
video about Git where various sideswipes about brain-dead CVS and Subversion
people are made. Brian had no particular axe to grind about this and said that
the Subversion camp bore no ill will to the distributed crowd and were rather
surprised at some of the venom coming back - a very measured and mature
response.
Brian mention the difference between a centralised model and a distributed
model - there is a lot that enterprise like about the control of a centralised
model. For example, laptops get stolen (he lost his a few weeks ago), and a
laptop might contain a whole distributed repository. Enterprises prefer more
control!
Martin Doettling's Intro to Karl
The
key points of this were:
- Estimated user base now exceeds 2 million
- 10x growth since 1.4
- Large numbers of enterprise users
Karl picked up on some of Brian's points about the community, and showed
various ways in which they have been able to get hackers to create software that
the enterprise can use!
- There is a very comprehensive
guide to how to
contribute - 43 pages of it! This is where people start.
- Some principles:
- Make it easy to do things right
- Make it rewarding to do things right
- Influence proportional to effort
- Moving from contributor to partial-committer to commiter
- Tracking no of patches etc by user - all automated with links
(see
Contribulyzer)
Other Notes
I couldn't stay for the second day, but some other points of interest:
- There are increasing numbers of tools based around Subversion - Collabnet, Polarion,
CodeBeamer etc
- Subversion command line is increasingly irrelevant as people use it
through Tortoise, Eclipse etc.
- Merge tracking there at long last with 1.5 just around the corner
- Really being used in the industry
- SVK provides an interesting distributed method
I also had some chats with Collabnet around the idea of perhaps the BCS CMSG
working with them to put on an event in London next year - definitely something
to look into.
Well worth a visit as a conference.
|