SubConf 2009 – A Report
SubConf is the annual conference of Subversion (Version Control System) project community. SubConf 2009 is the third such event which was held in Munich, Germany from 27-29th October 2009. Though SubConf is a User Conference wherein subversion users from various parts of the world take part, we do have developer hackathons in which subversion core developers come together discuss subversion roadmap, hack code, etc. The developers also meet the users to get feedback about subversion and also study the user needs so that the future releases can cater to user needs. This year we had a three day conference which was a great success.
We had 10 core developers of Subversion project at the conference venue namely Stephen Butler – Elego, Stefan Sperling – Elego, Neels Hofmeyr – Elego, Julian Foad – WANdisco, Greg Stein – Popular Open Source Developer, Hyrum K. Wright - Subversion Corp, Lieven Govaerts, Bert Huijben - The Competence Group, Senthil Kumaran - Collabnet, Inc, C. Michael Pilato - Collabnet, Inc. All the core developers were locked up (Hackathon) for all the 3 days in a room in the conference hotel where they discussed about various things related to Subversion development such as Working Copy Next Generation (WC-NG) library, usage of scratch pool, iterpool in subversion code base, release roadmap, interesting issues to work on, etc. Of course hackathon was not just discussion, we also had some real productive programming done, there were approximately 70 commits to the subversion repository with close to +46696/-36666 lines of change!
The
first day of the conference started officially in the evening around
7:00pm with Subversion RoundaTable where users of subversion from
various organization post their queries and feedback about
Subversion. They also explored the possibilities of getting a feature
introduced in future releases of Subversion. This was a fruitful
discussion which brings in new requirements to the Subversion Open
Source project every year, directly from the actual users.
On
the second day of the conference we had many talks scheduled
regarding Version Control Systems. The keynote was delivered by C.
Michael Pilato who is a long term (from Jan 2001) Subversion
developer. He spoke on the history of Subversion, the way the
community works, why CollabNet chose to make Subversion a Open Source
Project etc. This was refreshing to see the legacy and the
advancements that had gone through in the Subversion Community
through the years!
The
Subversion developers would like (which also forms the message from
subversion developers via the conference) the users to do real
testing of the pre-release versions (we don't want you to try on
production data, though) of Subversion software to catch bugs early
and due to the difficulty developers face (mainly due to computing
resources) in order to mimic the varied environments in which
subversion is deployed in organizations. The developers are
interested to hear from organizations which are interested in
offering resources to work on testing Subversion and welcome any such
potential prospects. The users requested accessibility for
pre-release version of Subversion binaries which the Subversion
community is not engaged in providing other than the source tarballs,
but the developers took a note of it, that they will work on some
mechanism to get it done in future. FWIW, Subversion project in the
recent past has started providing nightly tarballs of latest trunk
development sources - http://orac.ece.utexas.edu/pub/svn/nightly/
Some
of the talks given on the second day and third day of the conference
were as follows (there were even more talks, but they were
non-English):
Subversion Release Process by Hyrum Wright (Release manager of Subversion project) and Stefan Sperling
Bringing Subversion to the Java (TM) World by Alexander Kitaev and Alexander Sinyushkin
WC-NG (Subversion's new working copy management library) by Hyrum Wright
Comparing Apples to Oranges – Subversion, git and Mercurial by Stefan Sperling and Stephen Butler
Moving from SVN to Mercurial by Zsolt Koppany and Janos Koppany
Server Side Java bindings for Suvbersion by Dave Brown
SVN Obliterate by Julian Foad
Coding Control by Tony Smith from Perforce Software
See http://2009.subconf.de/vortraege/1-konferenztag/ , http://2009.subconf.de/vortraege/2-konferenztag/ for presentation slides.
Another interesting take away from the conference was Subversion Community's feeling about Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS). The community is excited about DVCS, since we are part of advancing the “State of the Art” and we are happy that, ultimately we have competitors in the version control world :) With the latest improvements on WC-NG library, Subversion will be able to get features like offline commits, shelving, etc which are premature to talk now, but are possible in the foreseeable future.
It was a nice experience for me to lurk around with the Subversion Developers at the Conference, whom I ve known for the past 2 years via email communication. We also had a surprise on the following week after the conference with the announcement made at ApacheCon 2009, about Subversion project finding a new home in Apache Software Foundation! With such kind of announcements and user conferences Subversion Community advances in a faster pace to make this extraordinary piece of Version Control software even better!
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