Not speaking at RailsConf Europe
I just got a mail confirming that I will not speak at RailsConf Europe this fall. I had submitted a proposal named “Version Control in Rails using Mercurial” which was going to show the benefits of using a distributed version control system when developing a Rails app. My opening line would have been “Hi, I am Marcus and I have been Subversion free for six months”.
For some weird reason, so many people in the Rails community - and the open source community as whole - still talk about Subversion as something great. It is not. Subversion is decent at best if you are comfortable knowing that you are using second or third best tools, but believe me, it is a crap choice knowing the alternatives in distributed version control.
I really wanted to point all this out to the a larger audience so that we maybe will move beyond the Subversion centric mess which is the Rails community today. Oh well, maybe next year.
For a very entertaining and opinionated view on version control systems, watch Linus Torvalds most awesome presentation on Git at Google.
June 15th, 2007 at 14:21
Too bad. Maybe your talk is something for http://rails.se/rails/show/Rails-Konferens instead. (I would be interested)
June 21st, 2007 at 14:52
The problem has been obvious since Subversion was four pages of design drafts, at which points I pointed out the problems (plus some others) to the Subversion team, and gave them an alternative design.
The response was a public request (since somebody else had also been pointing out hard problems) requesting that people do not point out problems unless they have a solution that would not take much time to evaluate.
My response at that time was to throw my hands up in disgust and do something else.
November 8th, 2007 at 13:09
Hi! Do you have any notes about using Rails with Mercurial? I would be very interested!!
November 14th, 2007 at 23:44
Ruben, I do not really have any notes per se. What would you like to know more about?