I just got a mail confirming that I will not speak at RailsConf Europe this fall. I had submitted a proposal named “Version Control in Rails using Mercurial” which was going to show the benefits of using a distributed version control system when developing a Rails app. My opening line would have been “Hi, I am Marcus and I have been Subversion free for six months”.
For some weird reason, so many people in the Rails community - and the open source community as whole - still talk about Subversion as something great. It is not. Subversion is decent at best if you are comfortable knowing that you are using second or third best tools, but believe me, it is a crap choice knowing the alternatives in distributed version control.
I really wanted to point all this out to the a larger audience so that we maybe will move beyond the Subversion centric mess which is the Rails community today. Oh well, maybe next year.
For a very entertaining and opinionated view on version control systems, watch Linus Torvalds most awesome presentation on Git at Google.