On Oct 8, 11:57 am, "Adam Benson"
<Adam.Ben...@NOSPAMMYSPAM.omnibus.co.ukwrote:
In all truth I didn't look at Subversion.
I'd heard about it but tend to shy away from this sort of thing. That may
well be irrational, of course, but I prefer the feeling of having a company
behind us that's responsible for supporting us, if and when we need it.
I guess different people have different preferences. I've generally
found that open source support is actually more responsive than
commercial support - and there tend to be more releases of open source
products (partly because there's no marketing etc required with each
release). There's also the option of just going in and fixing a
problem when you find one :)
Also, I really liked Accurev's front end because it was the first ever
source control system I'd ever come across that allowed you to see the
overall tree and just right click on a point and say "I'd like to branch
from here, please." We often have problems with developers who can't seem to
get it right with Clearcase and so I felt this option would a) encourage
people to branch (which they sometimes don't when they should) b) prevent
problems when they did.
I've found that most people take a while to get to grips with svn's
branching, but it's incredibly powerful, partly due to being
incredibly cheap. Creating a branch is just copying a node as far as
svn is concerned, which is really cheap (it doesn't actually copy all
the data, it just remembers when and where the original was).
However, once you understand the concepts (and in particular that you
can merge across time and/or space - it's really just a case of
applying a bunch of diffs) it's really nice.
Jon
