Subversion

Sometimes Linus is a genius

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When you begin to do more advanced things with subversion (not my idea, trust me), I would have to conclude using tarballs and larger hard drives is more useful than subversion.

For the first 10 years of kernel maintenance, we literally used tarballs and patches, which is a much superior source control management system than CVS is, but I did end up using CVS for 7 years at a commercial company [Transmeta[11]] and I hate it with a passion. When I say I hate CVS with a passion, I have to also say that if there are any SVN (Subversion) users in the audience, you might want to leave. Because my hatred of CVS has meant that I see Subversion as being the most pointless project ever started. The slogan of Subversion for a while was “CVS done right”, or something like that, and if you start with that kind of slogan, there’s nowhere you can go. There is no way to do CVS right.[12]

source: Wikipedia on Git.

Please, for the love of sanity (and science), do not use Subversion…..you have been warned!

sshfs + svn != fast

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While one of my main gripes about Subversion in the past, has always been “It’s slow”, I just found a real way to snailify it. Try running svn diff on a nice (~80M) chunk of source tree that’s mounted over sshfs.

It probably doesn’t help either, that the server has quad, quads, and  my systems a lowly dual, hehe.

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Today I’ve had to get used to living with Subversion again, as much as I simply love git, setting up a repository is easier with svn then git-svn :-S. Aside from the obvious problems that chop up from their different mental models it’s not that bad.

The lights flickering as the thunder blares outside on the other hand, tell me that I should probably *WAIT* to merge this vendor branch into the trunk – and go look up how atomic svn copy src-url … dst-url actually is in terms of network and power failures! If I was using git I would just say screw it and do the merge, because I know already that git doesn’t phone home to the repository, because the working copy is a repository.

Oh well, to the manuals!