
It's Time to Fix Subversion Merge - nreece
http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/58122/It-s-Time-to-Fix-Subversion-Merge.aspx
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wpeterson
This is a good write-up on how to build this, but it should be stated if
you've grown beyond what subversion can do you should switch your repository
over to Git or something with more advanced functionality built in.

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wccrawford
There's always 2 choices: Fix it, or replace it.

I think there's a good case for fixing Subversion. It's very easy to use
(except for merging!) and it's got good adoption.

Git is harder to understand and use, but obviously merging is miraculously
easy with it.

SVN took me about 10 minutes to learn. Git took me a week to grok the basics,
and months to learn the finer points.

If I had to pick one of the 2 to train a new coder in, I'd pick SVN... If it
had merging done well.

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billybob
This comment on the original post is interesting: "Fixing svn is a lot of
work. You could instead write a wrapper around git-svn to make it look like
svn. The wrapper can enforce a centralized workflow. The user should not be
able to tell the difference."

It's a neat idea. After all, which is easier: to fix the inner workings of
SVN, or to provide a more SVN-like interface to Git?

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wccrawford
That's a good point, too. It shouldn't be that hard to restrict Git's features
to a subset that is easy to learn and pretty much foolproof. (Foolproof
meaning you wouldn't need to dig into the advanced features.)

I wonder if someone has already tried to do this? It suddenly seems so
obvious.

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pnathan
If I recall correct, one of the lead devs of SVN has stated he is fine with
svn merge as-is.

I strongly recommend migrating to hg or git if possible.

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malkia
I'm using for my hobby project git, very slow learner, and it keeps me
thinking if we decide to replace Perforce (P4) with git - how we are going to
explain to people how it works - most of the people using it are actually not
software engineers, but artists, producers, animators, etc.

Then how much HDD space we should allocate, after knowing that Perforce's own
DB is in dozen terabytes.

How efficient git is with binary data. How would the team react when software
engineers would work with git for the source, and the rest P4/SVN? You can't
label the depot at once...

So there is probably plenty yet for SVN/P4/etc to be used. I myself fancy
being cool and using git, but it's only for my hobby yet - I haven't heard of
anyone using it at large in any big game development studio...

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grimen
With git you only really need to care about 5-6 commands for basic usage. For
more advanced stuff you could also use a GUI; for mac there are plenty of
tools that are really polished.

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malkia
That's fine, but the concept of intermediate storage (index) is not very easy
to explain to an artist. Some of them still don't grasp all of P4, and P4 is
very simple and easy - with changelists.

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pnathan
git commit -a -m "blaaaa"

or (my favorite!)

hg commit -m "blaaaa"

At least, that's how I do it!

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overshard
Complaining about Subversion merge is like complaining about how your Apple
IIe can no longer use modern software. Subversion and the Apple IIe are
outdated and should be migrated away from.

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BadassFractal
It's time to let SVN die and switch to git.

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mva
use git -> fixed

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MrMan
use HG -> fixed

