[svk-users] [svk-devel] The Future of SVK

[Jared Hardy]

Three cheers for CLK and SVK!

I don't know why 3 -- just the usual number I've heard. ;)
    I've been using a few custom scripts that utilize SVK to keep a
very important internal SVN repository mirrored across multiple
machines. I'm looking forward to the SVN 1.6 version updates, and to
using more Pushmi in the future.
    Even for people who have never used SVK directly, I think you have
benefited the general Open Source SCM community a great deal, by
showing them what is possible. I can see SVK's direct influence in the
new svnsync and svnmerge tools that are just gaining maturity now. My
hope is that the Subversion community will start to realize that
Distributed SCM should be their main goal now, and that SVN 2.x ends
up looking more like a mix of SVK and Mercurial than CVS.

Thank you for all your hard work, and for setting such a great
example. I hope to be using innovations that started with SVK for
several more years.

    Thanks again!
    Jared

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Chia-liang Kao <clkao at clkao.org> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> First things first, to answer the subject of this very message, I'd
> like to announce that we at Best Practical will no longer be actively
> developing SVK.  We won't be implementing new features or working to
> improve performance.  Rest assured, however, that for at least the
> next 18 months, we're committed to making sure that SVK will continue
> to work with the current release of Subversion.  (Changes to support
> Subversion 1.6 have landed in trunk and will be released within the
> next week.)
>
> When I started to develop SVK during my sabbatical year in 2003, the
> best practical option was to reuse the versioned filesystem from
> Subversion.  However using Subversion's filesystem as SVK's backend
> has become one of SVK's primary technical issues, as we found it to be
> inadequate as a storage backend for more complicated merges, which
> require a lot of traversal.
>
> If we take SVK as something that brought decentralized development to
> Subversion, which itself focused on being "CVS Done Right", we can
> mark SVK "mission complete".  The open source community has moved on
> from the Subversion model a lot sooner than many people thought, to a
> variety of version control systems designed from scratch with
> distributed development in mind. These have the advantages of a lot of
> recent innovation, and aren't burdened by the design of an existing
> system.  SVK (and Subversion, too) filled in the gap between CVS and
> the new world of distributed version control systems in a way I'm
> quite proud of.
>
> I'm grateful to all the members of the Subversion and SVK communities
> for their support, patches, bug reports, encouragement, discussions,
> and of course, complaints and flames as well.  The greatly improved
> productivity brought by the tools have contributed to countless open
> source projects.  If there is something called the version control
> "geist", we are all definitely part of it.  Thank you all!
>
> As much as this marks the end of SVK's 6 year life as a standalone
> development tool, We at Best Practical are committed to help scale
> Subversion in large and distributed environments.  SVK's core
> technology will live on as part of Pushmi, our enterprise read/write
> replication system for Subversion.
>
> I first built SVK so that I could contribute to open source projects
> while offline or traveling.  I'd like to thank the Lofoten Islands,
> the place where I was most productive hacking around, for helping to
> make that dream a reality.
>
> Thank you all again.
>
> Cheers,
> CLK
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