Re: [boost] Re: Was [RE: Moving from CVS to Subversion?] Now is "Subversion experiences from the field"

From: Rene Rivera (grafik.list_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-02-04 01:10:01

Jeff Garland wrote:
> On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 22:22:22 -0600, David B. Held wrote
> 
>>Walter Landry wrote:
>>
>>>David Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>>
>>>>[...]
>>>>no OSL (http://osl.iu.edu)
>>>
>>>One possibility would be to have OSL just host a CVS server,
>>
>> > and see whether that clears up most of the problems.
> 
> 
> It's an interesting suggestion to try out CVS at OSL -- it would carry far
> less risk and could serve as a stepping stone to SVN at OSL.  It would be very
> easy to go back if it went wrong.  It also means we wouldn't be violating the
> all important 'change one thing at a time' principle.

Along that same line of not changing more than one thing.. Perhaps SF 
would be open to experimenting with SVN support. Perhaps it's been long 
enough for SF to consider taking a request from a few projects to use 
SVN. It doesn't hurt to ask them if they would provide the experimental 
service just to see what all our options are.

> We have 86 'committers' listed on the SF page and we've really only heard the
> opinions of a few -- mostly me and Dave.  I'm certain that it's time for me to
> shut up now and listen to others ;-)

I've used a variety of version control systems, CVS, SVN, SourceSafe, 
Perforce, etc. and even written my own. The current SF provided CVS 
doesn't cause real problems for me. I haven't had a lock problem in more 
than a year and I do full checkouts daily. SF is on the slow side when 
it comes to doing those updates though.

My experience with SVN has not been all that pleasant but perhaps it's a 
result of only using the command line, maybe the GUIs out there fare better.

1. Obtaining information about the repository without doing a checkout 
of every branch, tag, etc. is horribly painful. The history/log facility 
is almost useless. For example I don't think theres way to find out in 
what branches/tags a particular file revision is part of, other than 
getting the complete repository and doing a file find.. yuk.

2. Conflict resolution when doing a merge is basically unworkable. Like 
CVS it decorates the working copy with "<<"/">>" comments, and copies 
the previous version. But the conflict resolution algorithm it uses 
makes worse, IMO, choices than the CVS equivalent. Often resulting in 
larger conflicts than CVS.

3. The lack of in place branching makes many things harder, and the 
possible equivalent of "svn copy"+"svn switch" is very difficult to 
manage. This discourages the use of small short lived branches useful 
for experimental code changes.

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