I've thought a lot about “what went wrong” with svn (and take it as axiomatic, on this list, that something went wrong) for two reasons: (1) like Bob, I really tried to like svn; (2) as I started to think about “what went wrong”—it seemed like what went wrong was a bunch of mistakes of exactly the sort that I am inclined towards myself and therefore have to actively resist: there, but for the grace of something, stand I.
Here's what I think went wrong. This is just my unscientific impression based on following news of the project over the years.
Via Ceejbot [1], “diagnosing svn [2]”
Those that are used to source control are pretty much in agreement that CVS (Concurrent Versions System) [3] sucks. I myself don't really have an opinion about CVS (Concurrent Versions System) as it does all that I want it for and was painless to install and get running. Mark [4] can't stand CVS and has been singing the praises of Subversion [5] for some time now. I myself have been a bit leary of Subversion, if only because it's not something I feel I need to use; Mark, on the other hand, is used to working on huge projects (he's used to ClearCase [6]) and feels he needs version control for what he does. For that, I have no problem.
But … Subversion isn't the easiest of packages to install. And Mark would be the first to agree with that. It took him several days of concerted effort to install a Subversion server, and even then, it pretty much requires a dedicated server of some hefty proportions to run. Even installing a client takes some work.
And the memory requirements (I've read that in some cases, over 300M of memory can be consumed) leave me wondering just what the heck Subversion does that requires such a hefty server configuration? I know I'm heading into a Dilbertesque Managerial mindset whereby what I do not understand must be trivial to implement, but still, the requirements for Subversion seem way excessive to me.
Now, I have hears some good things about arch [7]; supposedly it handles everything Subversion does, isn't as bad as CVS and is easy to install. It seems pretty easy to me—one executable.
We'll see …
[1] http://www.ceejbot.com/blog/comments/2003-12-30
[2] http://lists.fifthvision.net/pipermail/arch-users/2003
[5] http://subversion.tigris.org/
[6] http://www.snapsite.com/guests/timefold/public/html/page41.html