[boost] Initial Subversion/RapidSVN experience

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-02-05 12:35:06

I've spent several hours playing with the Subversion Boost repository that 
Troy Straszheim was kind enough to set up. Here is my initial experience:

* The downloads and installation of WxWidgets, Subversion, and 
RapidSVN  went smoothly; everything worked right away the first try.

* The initial Boost checkout using RapidSVN worked right away the first 
try. However, there doesn't seem to be any RapidSVN documentation, so if 
you aren't already familiar with WinCVS or similar, you might have more 
trouble.

***** Serious Problem ***** The initial checkout seemed to be working my 
DSL connection pretty hard, so I started Task Manager and monitored "bytes 
received". By the time the checkout finished, over 800 megabytes had been 
received! I tried a completely fresh CVS checkout for comparison; the 
received byte count was 12.5 megabytes. CVS uses compression (although you 
have to remember to turn it on); I couldn't find any mention of a 
compression option in the SVN docs, and a search of RapidSVN menus didn't 
turn up any way to turn on compression. We would need to solve this problem 
since 800 megabyte checkouts aren't acceptable for dial-up users.

* Boost Subversion updates are much faster than CVS; with CVS it took over 
12 minutes this morning, versus a bit more than one minute with 
Subversion/RapidSVN.

* Starting RapidSVN on the Boost SVN working copy is very slow; over 60 
seconds if the machine has just been turned on. The disk is being worked 
hard. 10 seconds if the cache is warm. For comparison, WinCVS starts in a 
second or so, even on a cold disk cache.

* The Subversion revision numbering scheme is so different from CVS that it 
will take quite a bit of reorientation (at least for me) to learn how to 
use it. It is very counter-intuitive for me that the previous revision of a 
file isn't 12345 if the current revision is 12346. I found myself 
constantly having to run "log" to figure out what the previous revision 
was. I often look at past revisions, so this is important to me. I suppose 
there is some way to do this as easily as with CVS, but I haven't figured 
that out yet.

* RapidSVN doesn't save location on exit, so every time you start it up you 
have to navigate to wherever you want to be. It also crashed on me several 
times. My sense is it is a nice piece of software, but also very immature 
as yet.

* The branching and tagging approaches seem different; we would have to 
work out new best practices before switching to SVN.

--Beman