I’m not going to try and make the case for the next generation of DVCS (Git, Bazaar, Mercurial). There are a host of posts on the subject and you can search for them via the magic of Google searches. In addition you have thriving communities around BitBucket and GitHub and you have major repositories for huge open source projects like Linux and OpenJDK. All of this means that the tools are good, mature and support sophisticated development processes.

However I have been surprised that a number of people feel that Subversion is enough for their needs. Now this might be true for some people but I genuinely think that DVCS is a step change in source control and that ultimately it will adopted almost universally and Subversion will end up in the same place as CVS is now.

I have been trying to explain why I think this to people and I sometimes get the feeling that Subversion has ended up defining source control best practice by enshrining the limitations of the tools. For example a lot of people think that branches of the code should be short-lived. This is true for Subversion, branching and merging is painful. However in Mercurial and Git I fill that branching and to a lesser extent merging is pretty painless. In fact you often find yourself doing it without really thinking. Therefore why limit yourself to short-lived branches? Since it is easy to take change sets into branches it is easy to push canonical updates into derivative branches as you need to keep them up to date.

In truth some branches, like maintenance releases and conditional changes, tended to be long-lived in Subversion repositories anyway. They were just painful to manage. Also you had this set of conventions around branches, tags and trunk in the Subversion repository that really didn’t help manage the history and intent of the code they contained. In the DVCS model those repository concepts become repositories in their own right and are easier to manage in my view.

What about continuous integration? Many people have expressed an opinion that they don’t like to be more than five minutes away from the canonical source tree. However checking in to the parent source line this frequently means that intermediate work is frequently checked into “trunk” or its equivalent. I think that DVCS opens the possibility of having a very clean and consistent trunk because intermediate products and continuous integration can be pushed closer to the source of change. You still need to push to the canonical code stream frequently but I think in a DVCS world you actually pull a lot more than you push.

It is certainly my anecdotal experience that code “breaks” are rarer in DVCS as you tend to synchronise in your personal branches and resolve issues there so the view of the code as pushed to the canonical stream is much more consistent.

The recording of change in code files is also much more sophisticated in the changesets of DVCS’s. The ability to drill into change on all the leading contenders is amazing, as is the ability to track it between different repositories. Switching from the linearity of revisions to the non-linear compilation of changesets can be headfuck but once you’ve mastered it you begin to see the possibilities of constructing the same sets of changes in different ways to result in outcomes that would traditionally be called “branches”. Your worldview changes.

Subversion is not what I want to work with anymore and every time I have to pull an SVN archive across the world via HTTP/WebDAV or I have to wait for the server to be available before I can create a new copy of trunk or commit a set of changes then I wonder why people are still so happy with Subversion.