[M3devel] CM3 services and Elego support, was: Re: conversion to another version control system

[Jay K]

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> Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:58:21 +0200
> From: wagner
> To: jay.krell at cornell.edu
> CC: m3devel at elegosoft.com
> Subject: RE: [M3devel] CM3 services and Elego support, was: Re: conversion to another version control system
>
> Quoting Jay K :
>
> > I think I would settle for SVN.
> > Though SVN has completely broken branching last I checked, and they
> > acknowledged it.
> > SVN also has relatively large dependencies to build from source.
>
> Branching in SVN is OK, merging is still wanting in case of tree
> conflicts.

Last I knew, svn wouldn't keep track if particular changes were merged or not.
You were supposed to note in the commit comment what you merged
and then know in future to ignore them.


Therefore, you can't merge.
Therefore, branching is just copying. All systems support that.
   Ok, so they might have copy-on-write cheaper branching. Not impressive.
   Perforce does branching darn near perfectly.
Also last I knew I think SVN only really supported like temporary single level
branches off of trunk. Perforce allows arbitrary deep hiearchies and a model
where developers stay in their branches indefinitely, with regular merging
in both directions. Model where branches aren't meant to be temporary
or experimental, but are meant for "staging" or "isolation", give places
for work to stabilize before moving around, and do that as a matter of
course for all changes. You do then have to build all the various branches
and regularly merge (they call it "integrate"). It is great for large teams.


SVN's model seems to be that branches are all temporary/experimental
and expected to eventually merge to trunk and then go away.



> > I would also like a system that doesn't drop files/directories all
> > over the place. Just in the root of a checkout should
> > suffice and be ideal. CVS is awful here and I believe SVN is too.
>
> The working copy overhaul expected to be included in SVN 1.7 will
> keep all metadata at the root of the checkout in an SQL database.


Excellent!
Maybe wait for that? :)


 - Jay