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

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-02-04 10:15:27

Rene Rivera <grafik.list_at_[hidden]> writes:

> 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.

Your reports below are certainly worrisome

> 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.

There are various filter programs for post-processing SVN log output,
but I haven't looked at or used any of them, and frankly don't know if
any address this issue.

http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2004-07/1602.shtml

seems to indicate that the SVN people think it was worth trading that
capability away to gain some others.  Now that I think of it, I've
never wanted to see every branch that a file is part of.  Tracing back
through a single branch is usually all I'm interested in.

There is a tool called svnmerge that, if we used it for merging,
should make it possible to look backwards through merge points as
well.  Or so I think.

http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2004-12/0409.shtml

> 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. 

Seriously??  I've never heard that before, but if so, that's just
dumb.  It's not as though the CVS algorithm isn't open source!

> Often resulting in larger conflicts than CVS.
>
> 3. The lack of in place branching makes many things harder

Like what?

> and the possible equivalent of "svn copy"+"svn switch" is very
> difficult to manage. 

Why?

> This discourages the use of small short lived branches useful for
> experimental code changes.

Hmm.  I'm getting nervous.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com