

How to Fail at SVN - Altreus
http://podcats.in/training/svn-fail.html

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pquerna
4/5 are problems unrelated to SVN. Heck, Git can burn you on all of those.

1/5 is about using svnserve instead of file:// and network mounts, and doesn't
need to be a rant, just a don't use file:// protocol for shared repositories.

I wish HN had downvotes for an article like this.

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Altreus
Thanks for the sophisticated and helpful response. I'll obviously implement
many of the suggestions you made to improve my article writing.

~~~
nailer
> It's neither reliable nor safe, nor can you easily administrate it.

While you're at it, the word you wanted was 'administer'.

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rix0r
I'm guessing that you've never had to use svn+ssh:// with a group of
developers. The file permissions hell you get into using that with multiple
users is very frustrating.

I much prefer the <http://> access method, and have never had a locking
problem.

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sapphirecat
> By default in SVN, everyone is committing to the same - and indeed the
> master, de-facto, controlling, always perfect - branch. Trunk.

It's worse than that; svn asks you to maintain the trunk/tags/branches
directory structure yourself, rather than including them as core concepts in
the VCS itself(1). So, someone can commit an update to something under tags/
and svn won't even give out a warning, since it has _no idea_ that tags/* are
supposed to be write-once.

1) Looks like they added `svn branch`, sometime after the 1.4.x version I'm
actually using.

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DanHulton
Pffft. Complaining about TortoiseSVN? Use SmartSVN - it works in all 3 OSes,
too. I know, I've had to use it in all 3 and it's nice to have that
consistancy.

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dasil003
Every time I read something about SVN I just thank god I don't have to use it
anymore. Just the thought of a merge-heavy workflow in svn gives me the
willies.

