This article is a result of my visit to Subconf in Munich a couple of weeks ago.

The first thing to say is that Subconf was very enjoyable and interesting and my compliments to the organisers. There were some excellent speakers and it was good to chat to various vendors too. I also had a very good time at the dinner that evening - the only slight fly in the ointment was the S-Bahn strike the following morning which meant a rather earlier taxi to the airport than I might have wished!

The two keynotes by Brian Behlendorf and Karl Fogel respectively were particularly good. Indeed it was good to get them at the conference since both guys seem to be scaling down their Subversion involvement - Brian has stepped down as CTO at Collabnet and Karl is running QuestionCopyright.org (although remains as President of Subversion Corporation.

Some of the slides are now available online.

Brian's Keynote

Brian mentioned his involvement in Apache and some of the lessons learnt about creating a community that worked. These lessons were then applied by Collab.net to get Subversion going. If you create a high quality community, you will create high quality software.

• Need to be nice to people to avoid a "fork" - Development leaders exhibit good communication skills, and can bring different ideas together.
• Conscious effort to bring new developers along the path: from “consumers”, to bug reporters, to patch submitters, to active contributors. 

Brian was asked the question in his talk about Linus's somewhat inflammatory video about Git where various sideswipes about brain-dead CVS and Subversion people are made. Brian had no particular axe to grind about this and said that the Subversion camp bore no ill will to the distributed crowd and were rather surprised at some of the venom coming back - a very measured and mature response.

Brian mention the difference between a centralised model and a distributed model - there is a lot that enterprise like about the control of a centralised model. For example, laptops get stolen (he lost his a few weeks ago), and a laptop might contain a whole distributed repository. Enterprises prefer more control!

Martin Doettling's Intro to Karl

The key points of this were:

• Estimated user base now exceeds 2 million
• 10x growth since 1.4
• Large numbers of enterprise users

Karl's Keynote - How Stuff Happens

Karl picked up on some of Brian's points about the community, and showed various ways in which they have been able to get hackers to create software that the enterprise can use!

• There is a very comprehensive guide to how to contribute - 43 pages of it! This is where people start.
• Some principles:
  • Make it easy to do things right
  • Make it rewarding to do things right
  • Influence proportional to effort
    • Moving from contributor to partial-committer to commiter
    • Tracking no of patches etc by user - all automated with links (see Contribulyzer)

Other Notes

I couldn't stay for the second day, but some other points of interest:

• There are increasing numbers of tools based around Subversion - Collabnet, Polarion, CodeBeamer etc
• Subversion command line is increasingly irrelevant as people use it through Tortoise, Eclipse etc.
• Merge tracking there at long last with 1.5 just around the corner
• Really being used in the industry
• SVK provides an interesting distributed method

I also had some chats with Collabnet around the idea of perhaps the BCS CMSG working with them to put on an event in London next year - definitely something to look into.

Well worth a visit as a conference.