GitHub 從 2010 年的愚人節時宣佈支援 Subversion:「Announcing SVN Support」,雖然是愚人節的功能,但這個功能是會動的。
而這個功能出現十多年後,可以預期用的人愈來愈少。前幾天 GitHub 宣佈將在大約一年後的 2024/01/08 停止支援 Subversion:「Sunsetting Subversion support」。
然後在 Hacker News 上的討論「GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support (github.blog)」則是直接讓 Scott Chacon (GitHub co-founder,同時也是第一篇公告文的作者 + 這個功能的兇手之一) 出來解釋當初搞出這個東西的前因與後果,還有一些感想。
裡面有提到這個功能當初推出來的時候是個好玩的性質,但意外的在上線後發現也讓一些老系統可以比較容易轉移:也就是讓 developer 可以先開始用 Git,但 CI 類的工具可以先不用改。
As one of the GitHub cofounders and the brainchild of this particular feature, I want to let everyone know that this is maybe the funniest thing I've ever done.
We released this feature and published the announcing blog post, on April Fool's Day, 2010. I remember demoing it to the other GitHub guys and saying how funny it would be if we made this an April Fool's day post as though it was a big stupid joke but then it actually completely worked on every repository we had and we all thought it would be great. Until nobody believed us. Which in hindsight we should have seen coming, since that was the joke, but nobody actually tried it. Then people tried it and it worked and they thought it was a trick or something.
It was really helpful for people migrating from legacy SVN based systems to us (CI and stuff) but I'm surprised to some degree that it's still running 13 years later when nobody is really facing that issue anymore. And I'm still undecided if the joke was worth the massive confusion it caused. But if I'm pressed, I would say that I would 100% release it on April Fool's Day again.
不過想要拔掉這個功能的起因不知道是什麼,技術債不知道有多少...