****************
Driving adoption
****************

Getting adoption means persuading people that it's a good choice.


I think the key is to have something that key project leaders see as
worth using.  Imagine what it would take to get tridge, havoc, or akpm
to switch.  Or not even to switch, but to even just try it out.

* Simple operations must be simple.

* The project and the implementation must not have bad smells.

* Given their current understanding of the problem, there must be at
  one feature that's clearly better than what they're currently
  using.


What holds it back now?

* Too complex on initial impression

* Bad smell from having so many forks/wrappers/kooky opinions

* Some of the more exotic features can only be appreciated on
  familiarity

* It doesn't actually achieve by default a lot of the advantages that
  it ought to: for example it still blocks on the network


Good features at the moment

* Archive storage is clean; probably makes a favorable impression on
  people who look at it

* Relatively few dependencies (if you don't look too closely at
  hackerlab, etc)


From `Ben Collins-Sussman`__

__ http://www.red-bean.com/sussman/svn-anti-fud.html

   If you're learning about Subversion and thinking of using it in
   your group or company, please approach it the way you'd approach
   any new product: with caution. This isn't to say that Subversion is
   unreliable... but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use some common
   sense either. Don't blindly jump into the deep end without a
   test-drive. No user wants a new product forced upon them, and if
   you're going to be responsible for administering the system, you
   better have some familiarity with it before rolling it out to
   everyone. Find a smallish project, and set it up as a "pilot" for
   Subversion. Ask for enthusiastic volunteers to test-drive the
   experiment. In the end, if Subversion turns out to be a good fit,
   you'll have much happier developers (who have been part of the
   process from the start) and you'll be ready to support a larger
   installation as well. [...]

   When Subversion hit "alpha" it was already being used by dozens of private developers and shops for real work. Any other project probably would have called the product "1.0" at that point, but we deliberately decided to delay that label as long as possible. Because we're talking managing people's irreplaceable data, the project was extremely conservative about labeling something 1.0. We were aware that many people were waiting for that label before using Subversion, and had very specific expectations about the meaning of that label. So we stuck to that standard. All it takes is one high-profile case of data loss to destroy an SCM's reputation.


`John S. Yates, Jr.`__:

__ http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2004-10/msg00370.html

  First let me say that I have nothing but increasing respect for
  Tom's skills and accomplishments.
  
  That said I see Gnu Arch as really just emerging from a period
  of prototype development.  If the project really wants to take
  over the world, and especially supplant projects with momentum
  and commercial customers (e.g. Subversion, BitKeeper, etc) then
  I would warn against two mistakes I have experienced repeatedly
  in my career:
  
  1) Deferring to a tiny installed base instead of focusing on
     eliminating barriers to adoption
  
  2) Believing that great technology will be irresistible no matter
     how it is presented
  
  Appearances matter.  Expectations matter.  Standards (official
  or de facto) matter.

There is also a `reply from Tom`__.

__ http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2004-10/msg00430.html

Clear wins
----------

To convince people to use Baz, there has to be some feature they can
clearly understand which will be much better under Baz.  It must be
something they do today.

* Offline support

* Almost no network delays

* Atomic changes (svn already has this)

* Correct repeated merges

* Read-only mirroring archives (not really important) 

My model is that people will consider changing if 

1. it's at least as good as cvs/svn
2. AND there are no big concerns about implementation/safety
3. AND there is at least one feature which is easy to use and a big win

This gets you to some people at least trying it.  Will people migrate
big projects to it?  Maybe, if it looks safe, it fixes there problem,
and it doesn't look like something substantially better is on the
horizon.