Work-Related Grumble

[cjsmith]

I officially hate SVN.

(Don't get me wrong; it's probably great for power users and people who never merge to/from a branch more than once or twice. Many thanks to preedmozblog, by the way, for pointing me at a tool that might replace my entire whiteboard for branch merge management. The problem I have with SVN is that when not everyone is a power user, or not everyone knows to track merges on their whiteboard, you get real trouble.)

Comments

[ken_r]

For the most part I think it's a lot better than CVS. But if you need to do lots of merges between lots of branches, you probably at *least* want something like svnmerge on top of it (or svk?) to track what's been merged where.

At work, our merging isn't that hairy. (And for the most part only the release manager does merges to release branches, and other branches tend to be developers' private branches.)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Ok. Our merges are pretty straightforward here --- generally bugfixes that got made on a post-release branch that need to be applied to the mainline as well, and occasionally a private developer branch. Thanks for the clarification.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Sorry I vanished for a bit there. Yes, svn doesn't have to be awful, as long as you're not implementing a large tree of branches (with frequent cross-merging) that's much better suited to a full-time release engineer and an installation of Perforce. Sadly, we're trying to do just that.

[tytso.livejournal.com]

There are other tools such as Mercurial and git that are much better at handling a large number of branches and merging work done in topic branches down into one or more release branches. The problem of course is this requires retraining the entire development population, which is often an impractical proposition.