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

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Definitely power user. Several of the people here don't think you need to remember this stuff because "Subversion keeps track of it". Heck, we're having a glorious time merely trying to use the same version of Subversion client on Linux, Mac, Windows, and Cygwin. I can't count the number of times I've had to blow away my source tree because "This client is too old to work with working copy '.'; please get a newer Subversion client."

So yeah, maybe "power user" is a little bit overstating the case, eh?

[eichin.livejournal.com]

That FAQ item is probably one of the clearest bits of evidence that svn is a pretty good toolkit for *building* a version control system, but it really isn't a complete breakfast. (We use it very heavily... but anyone who wants to be clever typically comes and bugs me-as-releng, either beforehand, or after screwing it up once - and I have this growing pile of tools I've written to do actually releng tasks.) (and no, CVS "isn't even" a useful toolkit for this.)

I've heard rumours that if we used perforce, the release engineer would be happier (and everyone else would be in pain :-) but I haven't dug further; we're certainly not leaving svn any time soon, especially having started with CVS.

(I think svk is interesting as a tool for doing short term projects off-trunk and *not* checking them in, ie. gives developers an alternative to branching at all... but you need more discipline in that model, especially since noone's reviewing your commits until you're done...)