This is absolutely not a joke, but we couldn't miss the opportunity to have a little fun with the announcement.

Missed opportunity to announce RCS support, or a Gopher browser interface. Bah!

Didn't you guys do this as an actual April Fools joke the year you launched?

We didn't anticipate hiring someone as dangerously insane as Scott Chacon willing to actually build this for us :)

To answer the other question below, we will be rolling out write support in the future. The idea that millions of SVN users can start using GitHub with zero effort is a really big deal for us.

How do SVN clients deal with "git push --force"?

yep, they did it in 2008: http://github.com/blog/31-back-to-subversion.

they amended the post since then:

While this post was made in jest originally, head over to Announcing SVN Support to see that we have really, truly built this functionality into GitHub.

Come on guys and gals, we’re not going to make the same April Fools joke twice, that’s just lazy :-)

You guys rock. This doesn't really impact me, but releasing this feature on a day like today--brilliant!

Backwards-compatibility efforts like these are great. Some CVS/SVN users are (un?)surprisingly stubborn about trying new things, and they can halt upgrade efforts with their complaints. My company is converting our repositories from CVS to git as we speak, and the number within our ranks who prefer CVS is surprising. Without support for older programs like CVS, we wouldn't have the momentum to upgrade

Kudos to Github for providing one less excuse to holdouts!

I'd like to know how that transition is going for you. Are you having the expected difficulty of explaining a DVCS workflow? Any difficulties converting CVS modules to git repositories?

At work, I'm stuck on CVS. I'd love to use git, but the people I work with don't really know how to use any version control system properly. My commits are the only ones with commit messages. They don't use tags and haven't heard of branches.

I mentioned git to my boss, but he was hesitant because he couldn't get it running on his Windows 7 box at home (we don't use Windows 7 at work, mostly WinXP). I did a quick Google search and found that the problem is with a changed DLL in Windows 7, and that putting the old version of that DLL in git's bin directory should work, but I don't think my boss tried that.

It's going pretty well, but we're cheating: we give the other devs both the CVS and the git checkout commands, and let them use what they want. The early adopters tend to be those who already use it outside of work.

I agree that the tools on Windows aren't stable: I've had to help debug at least 3 or 4 git installs of TortoiseGit-esque tools. I personally just use it from the command line.

Moving forward, we'll train people to use git when they go offsite with other developers, or if they're curious. Part of our job involves spending days away from an Internet connection, so they'll suddenly be sink-or-swim and probably never turn back :)

I thought they already did this a few years ago - http://github.com/blog/31-back-to-subversion ;)

Oh, but this time it actually works!

You know, once you are logged into Github, you can never see the Github homepage ever again :(

You can, you just have to know the URL: http://github.com/home

I have the same problem with Twitter.

it will now just be known as "Hub"

If this is a joke, it's a damn good one. Otherwise, it's a cool feature :-)

No joke, try it out. `svn co http://svn.github.com/jquery/jquery`

It works from the command line, but not from the browser "headers incomplete".

However it's pretty annoying that there's no access control through svn. I just checked out my private repo without entering any credentials :(

There is, try checking out someone else's private repo. You can't :)

(For example, defunkt/github)

;)

Is visiting a svn repo via a web browser really supposed to do anything?

I realized that - but will this "feature" be avaible after midnight?

Of course.

The repos are read only though. Thankfully!

Probably a stupid question, but do you guys plan on expanding upon this? Pretty please?

schacon says in the comments on the linked post that they plan to have write too, although that might be a subtle April Fool's joke.

That said, schacon has been working on increasing compatibility between VCSes like producing hg-git. It'd be great if a site like Github that was significantly more agnostic about VCS.

Who knows what will happen in the future.

Implement writes and sell it as a migration tool to companies who are nervous about switching. You will friggin clean up.

It seems that this is no joke. Which brings me to an interesting question: why would you release anything true on April 1st?

It just lends itself to be second guessed and it could miss a critical uptake period of the first day of release...

It's fun. You say "No way! That was way too obviously a joke, guys." And they say "seriously, try it", and lo and behold, it actually works.

It's kind of like a 2nd-order April Fool's joke--they trick you into thinking they're tricking you.

Not if your product has a too good to be true factor. For instance, the gmail release worked out really beautifully.

While surprising, I think GitHub's announcement today fails to meet that criteria.

Gmail.

Gmail's ridiculous "endless" storage space.

Both were launched on an April 1.