It does not come as a great surprise, yet I feel sad. Oracle’s Statement of Direction on Oracle SCM declares the product ‘dead as a dodo’. Well, not quite. No new features will be added, yet the tool will be supported for a long time to come, along with Designer 10g (that depends on Oracle SCM). So if you do Designer development, Oracle SCM is still your (only viable) option for doing version control. However, do not plan on setting up full blown Software Configuration Management for your source files based on Oracle SCM. Instead, go to CVS.
I spent almost 3 years on Oracle SCM and its predecessors, including the infamous Oracle Echo (pka Echo/2000) toolset. I sort of said goodbye to it some three years ago, but it was an interesting time and the contacts will the developers at Oracle’s Thames Valley Park development center rank among the highlights of my time at Oracle. However, having said all that, it is probably a good thing that Oracle provides clarity. There have been so many plans (hosted SCM, web based Oracle Designer – remember Prodigy?? – etc.) that all came to nothing. Now we know where we stand on Oracle SCM.
Maybe we should think on a way to migrate files controlled in Oracle SCM away to Subversion (or CVS), while maintaining meta-data such as version labels, check in dates and notes and release labels. I am not sure how many people would be interested, but those who need to make the move will be very grateful I’d say.
Andrej Koelewijn remarks in his The future of version control in JDeveloper, that Oracle will improve its Subversion support instead… a good development 🙂