Re: Switching to Subversion

[joakim@verona.se]

"Juanma Barranquero" <lekktu@gmail.com> writes:

> On 11/12/06, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> Before considering use of subversion for Emacs I would have to use it
>> for something else, to see what it is like.
>
> Sounds reasonable. I think you'll find Subversion is designed to look
> just like a better CVS. The command set is very similar.
>
> There are quite a lot other good SCM programs out there (Arch,
> Monotone, svk), but they are far less mature and, in my (limited)
> tests, the user experience is very different. Arch filenames give me
> headaches.

I've used a number of these superficially, mostly as a user that wants
to checkout and build stuff regularily, and maintain some local
patches. So, for what its worth, heres my experiences:

CVS: updating from a central repos is easy, but maintaining local
patches quickly gets out of hand

Arch: updating from a central repos is often slow and error prone even
for small projects. Using the alternative implementation Baz helps.

SVN: most things are easy and intuitive to do, like updating,
branching, etc. The backend DB does get into weird states at times,
but it was reoverable. Also, this seems to be gone with recent SVN.
(this was together with Trac which is a really good bugtracker/wiki
thing that integrates with SVN)

git: One savannah project I work with has a central CVS repos. In
order to maintain a number of local patches I imported this into a git
repos. Then I worked on top of this with a tool called stg that handles
different patches. Importing the CVS repos takes hours, even for this
project which isnt anything like emacs in size. Then, any git
operation is for me totaly unintuitive, except for the things I do
through the stg frontend, which is very easy(make new patches, pop/push
them, sync with cvs).


> (Yes, I'm an una(bash|sham)ed Subversion proponent :)
>
>                    /L/e/k/t/u

-- 
Joakim Verona