On Mon, Dec 13, 2021 at 07:14:46AM -0600, Luke Mauldin wrote:
> It looks like the stashing functionality is still experimental. Do you think
> there will be more funding in the future to complete it or do you think it
> may remain unfinished for a long period of time?
>
I do not know any specifics about the funding arragements that were
made for the staging feature. What I do know is what anyone can tell
from public records such as our mailing list archives and in our commit
history. Julian, like many others, is working in other jobs nowadays and
has not actively contributed much to SVN during the last year or so.
I suspect there are still some developers who would be open to the idea
of returning to continue working on in-progress features if they could
put food on the table in return. A simple fact is that any altruism
these people have spent over years in order to provide this tool to
communities and companies has largely run dry by now. While SVN grew
up because many of its developers were on paid time since 2000, many
were also willing to invest some of their free time to help out because
this was a fun and challenging project to work on.
But not many can afford to do such work in their free time forever, given
the complexity of the subject matter, the expectations of quality that
need to be met, and the fact that most users are now businesses which
simply use SVN because it does not cost them a cent compared to similar
proprietary offerings which are usually very expensive. I know this
because over the course of about a decade I have helped many such
companies move over to SVN from such platforms, and SVN works so well
for many of them that most do not even see a need for a paid support
contract to get help in case things go wrong. I have seen people in
companies who wanted to pitch such things to their bosses but found
themselves in a difficult spot when trying to justify a budget for
SVN tooling ("wait, did we not just got rid of ClearCase in order
to save such costs...?")
And naturally, the longer people have moved on with their lives,
the less interest they will have in returning to past projects.
