Recently C Michael Pilato of the core subversion team posted a mail to the subversion dev mailing list suggesting a vision and roadmap for the future of Subversion. Naturally, he wanted as much feedback and response as possible which is why I'm posting this here - to elicit some suggestions and contributions from you, the users of Subversion. Any comments are welcome, and I shall feedback a synopsis with a link to this question to the dev mailing list. Similarly, I've created a post on ServerFault to get feedback from the administator side of things too.
So, without further ado:
Vision
The first thing on his "vision statement" is:
Subversion has no future as a DVCS
tool. Let's just get that out there.
At least two very successful such
tools exist already, and to squeeze
another horse into that race would be
a poor investment of energy and
talent.
There's no need to suggest distributed features for subversion. If you want a DVCS, there should be no ill-feeling if you migrate to Git, Mercurial or Bazaar. As he says, its pointless trying to make SVN like them when they already exist, especially when there are different usage patterns that SVN should be targetting.
The vision for Subversion is:
Subversion exists to be universally
recognized and adopted as an
open-source, centralized version
control system characterized by its
reliability as a safe haven for
valuable data; the simplicity of its
model and usage; and its ability to
support the needs of a wide variety of
users and projects, from individuals
to large-scale enterprise operations.
Roadmap
Several ideas were suggested as being "very nice to have" and are offered as the starting point of a future roadmap. These are:
Obliterate
Shelve/Checkpoint
Repository-dictated Configuration
Rename Tracking
Improved Merging
Improved Tree Conflict Handling
Enterprise Authentication Mechanisms
Forward History Searching
Log Message Templates
If anyone has suggestions to add, or comments on these, the subversion community would welcome all of them.
Community
And lastly, there was a call for more people to become involved with Subversion development. As with most OSS projects it can be daunting to join, but there is now a push for more to be done to help. If you feel like you can contribute, please do so.
