On Tue, May 09, 2023 at 11:11:40PM -0500, Greg Stein wrote: > The ASF is completely confident in svn, and basically 99% of our corporate > records, and some of our key workflows (eg. account requests, TLP > graduation, ICLA recording) is all based on Apache Subversion. Also a fact. > And zero plans to change that. Git is not envisioned to replace any of that. > > Your implication that the Foundation was somehow required to grow the svn > community is misplaced. That is not its purpose. The Apache Subversion > community is responsible for growing itself. In 2011, the Board of > Directors specifically declined to assist a TLP with its community (*way* > larger than svn) because that is not the purpose of the Foundation. We do > not want some people "over there" on the Foundation/administrative side > interfering with the technical operation, and the community dynamics of one > of the communities. Or, even worse, to *pick* which communities get > assistance, while others do not. No winners. No losers. (clearly: I am > upset by your implication that you've been let down; the true answer is > missing a step on the Foundation's role)
Thanks for writing this up, Greg. Point taken. I did not mean to imply that the foundation was somehow responsible for adding developers to the project. I did have some hope that we would see individual self-motivated contributors arriving via various ASF projects because they are all using SVN every day on svn.apache.org, are programmers, might have itches to scratch, already have commit access to ^/subversion, and there is some sense of shared ownership across the ASF community. I was reminded of all this by Graham's remark. It's the lack of such interactions that I find disappointing in retrospect. There certainly have been some, but relatively few. Of course, it's not the foundation's job to make that happen. It's up to the individuals in the larger ASF community to make a decision whether to get involved. > As Daniel notes else-thread, the suggestion is not git vs. svn. It is > entirely about "Do we want the tools offered by GitHub, to be made > available to the Apache HTTPD community?" Yep, that is very clear. And there is the network effect which makes GitHub a popular platform in its own right. > I'm an svn partisan, but I also appreciate GitHub for its utility. I > voted +1 to move, for that reason only. Hands-down, I'd -1 a move to git. > It was only GitHub that changed my opinion on this issue. I'll abstain since I don't contribute much to HTTPD anymore and probably won't find the time to do so in the foreseeable future. I'll run with whatever gets decided by the community. Cheers, Stefan
