29 engineers on Hacker News describe using CVS first-hand: 1 endorse it, 8 regret it, 0 are mixed.
“I was forced to use both CVS and SVN in a thankfully very distant past”
regret · production · TacticalCoder · 2026-01-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Then, I moved from CVS to SVN and thought: "This is revolutionary. I can rename and merge."”
regret · personal · throwaway2037 · 2025-06-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“when administering that server fell onto my plate, I liked it a lot better than CVS”
regret · production · hoistbypetard · 2024-07-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to CVS and it was immediately better, followed by SVN a few years later.”
endorse · production · ianmcgowan · 2023-01-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Once we got to git our lives were so much better.”
regret · production · ridiculous_fish · 2022-09-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For ** sake, they were using CVS, they fixed stuff directly in Prod (scripting FTW, yay! </sarcasm>) and the code stank!”
regret · production · tharkun__ · 2022-01-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was glorious but as soon as a couple of non-technical people joined it was unmanageable and inevitably someone would have to troubleshoot others' environments”
regret · production · katsukare- · 2019-01-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“They adopted CVS even though the founders thought it was pointless. We moved to SVN a couple years later when another new programmer said CVS was crap.”
regret · production · 2 yr · varikin · 2011-06-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have used long time (2001) ago CVS as repository for one of our games... that form of commenting messed up somehow the diff information”
regret · production · malkia · 2010-02-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“svn was the day to day system when I started. But then we moved to git”
neutral · production · Macha · 2026-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Git did not exist either, I migrated out cvs to a beta release of Subversion.”
neutral · production · jillesvangurp · 2026-09-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we switched from CVS to SVN I had to show ROI”
neutral · production · bandrami · 2026-06-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've also done cvs -> svn -> git. All the commits have survived migration.”
neutral · production · Izkata · 2026-06-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched from CVS to git, and were evaluating multiple choices.”
neutral · production · pitkali · 2026-05-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“RCS to CVS to git. Each step was lossless.”
neutral · production · e40 · 2026-05-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“some of these hundreds of repos we manage started in cvs, not svn, and are now slowly being migrated to git.”
neutral · production · Izkata · 2025-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Tooling, integrations, and automation (Including CI) were all things we used at my work when we switched from CVS to SVN almost 20 years ago.”
neutral · production · aidenn0 · 2025-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When I started working at Yahoo, everything was in CVS on one hostname... I was actually fine with CVS and don't really care about git features”
neutral · production · toast0 · 2024-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“once we got a server I had them move to CVS.”
neutral · production · jmclnx · 2024-04-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used to use a GUI when working with TFS, CVS, and SVN.”
neutral · production · wolpoli · 2023-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I organized the migration from CVS -> Mercurial at my last job”
neutral · production · devman0 · 2023-01-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we didn't always have to look into the CVS history and find bug-1376892.”
neutral · production · fma · 2021-11-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used CVS and later SVN for years before I used git”
neutral · personal · kelnos · 2020-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I started in the late 90's when cvs was popular. Then we moved to svn.”
neutral · production · icedchai · 2019-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Over the year I've used CVS, SVN, bazaar, Mercurial and Git.”
neutral · personal · ldng · 2019-08-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Before SVN existed we used CVS and we migrated to SVN from CVS about, idk, 15-ish years ago?”
neutral · production · astura · 2018-04-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we migrated over from CVS to git, we installed an instance of GitLab.”
neutral · production · hypr_geek · 2014-04-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated from CVS to Mercurial in 2009 and then to Git a year later.”
neutral · production · ewood · 2012-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we switched to CVS, I asked "But what happens if people make incompatible changes"”
neutral · production · nostrademons · 2011-02-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?