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****************
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.
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