I started to use Subversion one year ago and liked the elegant file-system design a lot. Soon it became impossible for me to go back to CVS. This means that I felt uncomfortable whenever I was working on projects using CVS, and I wanted to see a tool to keep my Subversion repository in sync with a CVS repository. This would not only save me time importing snapshots into vendor branches, but it would also give me the whole history when I'm not online.
I found Barrie's VCP and wrote a Subversion driver. Then I understood why people said Subversion was slow. My driver invoked the svn command, and it took something like 30 hours to convert from a CVS repository that resulted in 3000 revisions in the Subversion repository.
Fortunately the Subversion developers made the code easy and ready for wrapping into different languages using SWIG. At that time, only Python bindings were implemented, so I had to do the Perl bindings myself. With the Perl bindings implemented rapidly, VCP gets much faster, and I also started writing SVN::Mirror, a module that enables mirroring between Subversion repositories. When I felt bored, I would add Subversion back-end support to tools like Bloxsom and Kwiki.
Then the season for traveling came. As I'm far more productive and creative while disconnected from the Internet, I realized I need a distributed version control system, and decided to give myself a year break to develop such a tool to enable me to be even more productive in the future. svk was born soon after my birthday in September 2003.
