Re: [Caml-list] [OT] Rant about VCS: Conclusions

[Blair Zajac <blair@orcaware.com>]

Alex Baretta wrote:
> Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 22:37:53 +0100
>> Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> We have had good success with subversion, 
>>
>>
>>
>> I looked at subversion before deciding on Arch. ...  This allows me to
>> run a couple of parallel developement branches, share those that
>> need to be with other external developers and merge acorss the
>> branches pretty much at will.
>> I have not seen another source contol system which handles
>> branches as nicely as Arch.
>>
>> Erik
> 
> 
> Paul Snively wrote:
>  > It really does sound as though you're edging from "version control"
>  > into "configuration management." If that's the case, you may want to
>  > look at Arch and its surrounding tools. In particular, the
>  > documentation at
>  > <http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/tutorial/multi-tree-
>  > projects.html>, "Multi-tree Projects and Configuration Management,"
>  > might be helpful to you.
> 
> There seems to be some agreement on the fact the "Configuration 
> Management Tool of Choice for Discriminating Software Company" is Arch. 
> Our project seems complicated enough to seriously consider moving to arch.
> 
> We have currently reimplemented our project's storage as a 
> non-denumerable set of darcs repositories, distributed in a 
> discontinuous manner over our company's network. I envision a 
> significant risk of complexity explosion, because darcs only supports 
> branches as duplicate repositories, which sounds like a nightmare. 
> However, darcs is about as much as would fit in before Christmas. Maybe 
> Santa Claus will put a working arch repository under my Christmas tree...
> 
> Alex

Alex,

Coming into this thread a little late and being somebody who has commit 
rights to the Subversion source code, I'll try to make a couple unbiased 
comments on some of the statements made in this thread :)

The Subversion code is stable and production ready.  There were issues 
with the initial versions of Subversion and I had my share of locked 
repositories, but probably like early versions of every version control 
system, they have been resolved.  Also, the Subversion team eats their 
own dog food.

At this "Discriminating Software Company", we moved from CVS to 
Subversion one year ago and our Subversion repositories now contain 5.4 
Gbytes of code, documentation, Squeak binaries, PDFs, etc.  We haven't 
lost any data.

 From a company's point of view, other things you get that I don't 
believe the other mentioned open-source VCS' have are professional 
support and native Windows clients.  In our team, we have people 
creating documentation (Word documents, PDFs) for the code we write and 
we use TortoiseSVN, a Windows Explorer shell integration which makes it 
easy for non-coders to use a VCS while keeping a familiar interface, in 
this case just Windows itself.

Regarding merging, unlike CVS, Subversion has changesets, so merging is 
simply picking the changeset(s) you want from one path and applying it 
to another:

     % svn merge -r 2345:2347 branch/latest_changes branch/stable

You may want to check these URLs and I'll leave the propaganda at that :)

http://subversion.tigris.org/propaganda.html
http://www.red-bean.com/sussman/svn-anti-fud.html
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Regards,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac <blair@orcaware.com>
Plots of your system's performance - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/