Well, I have been using it for 'production' work for last 6 months and I have not found any issues. I am not suggesting that everyone will have the same experience but I think you should give it a try before dismissing it outright based on someone else's experience.

Also, if you could provide some real details on the 'complexity and awkwardness', I could share my experience which could be helpful.

> give it a try before dismissing it

Giving it a try can only prove the presence of fragility, not its absence :-)

Generally, people are very reluctant to criticize "hip" tools like e.g. Clojure, Haskell, Google Go, Git or its accessories. So, when 3 out of 4 people say they had problems with it, to me it weighs very heavily on the negative side.

For the record, I agree with you on Git (on Windows at least). It's improved at a rapid pace but it's still a bit awkward.

However, that's no reason to dismiss all version control.

I'm glad you agree, because for the rest of the equation (Tarballs > CVS > SVN), Linus agrees with me. So you see, I embody the combined wisdom of both of you, as far as version control goes.

You have his equation wrong. He says in this article that SVN is still better than CVS. And really, I would agree that tarballs are better than CVS. So the equation is more likely SVN > Tarballs > CVS. Don't put words in Linus's mouth.

Also Subversion no longer stores it's data in a database so Linus's objection in this article has been resolved.

Finally, Linus's needs are pretty unique in the world. Linus isn't satisfied with Subversion for the same reasons it might work perfectly well for you.

> He says in this article that SVN is still better than CVS.

He says SVN is better, but is more fragile (which for source control, I interpret as being worse):

    SVN fixes (supposedly) those "implementation 
    suckiness" issues. ... 
    I think it's also a much more fragile setup and 
    there's apparently been people who lost their 
    entire database to corruption

Even if SVN = CVS, clearly Tarballs > SVN, according to him. His actual quote was Tarballs >> CVS. I can dig it up if you can't.

Thousands of companies (and millions of developers) use Subversion. It's 10 year old. It's an Apache project now. It's solid. It's a simple and easy to use tool that will make your life better. That's all.

If you find that personally offensive, so be it.

Why do you say that I find this personally offensive?! You are not making a lot of sense. I'm just quoting Linus who probably had more experience with various VCSs than any of us.

Linus was more ranting that Subversion uses a binary database. If it gets corrupted, you're screwed.

CVS's database is just RCS files, plus a little. Nice and easy to restore if Bad Things start to occur.

Subversion now use text files for storage too. You have the option of that or the Berkley DB.