[geeks] Anyone use Subversion?

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Apr 7, 2009, at 12:31 , Phil Stracchino wrote:

> Mark Benson wrote:
>> You could use CVS instead, but I know nothing about CVS.
>
> I'd have been perfectly happy to use cvs, but the client was very
> specific about wanting either svn or git used.  I've never had  
> problems
> like this with cvs.

CVS is notorious for corruption, because it is inherent in the  
underlying RCS code.

You always get corruption with CVS if you use it long enough.

That's probably why they want to avoid it.

I've never used CVS that it didn't eventually screw up.

It's not possible to avoid forever because it is caused by bugs in RCS  
which always happen eventually.  They are bugs of foundation design,  
and cannot be fixed.

Subversion was created in part to get rid of RCS.

The two most common causes of Subversion corruption are actually not  
subversion code itself, but the support it needs: the filesystem and  
the Berkely DB libraries.

If you use a filesystem based repository, your greatest risk is  
failure of the filesystem itself, which is more common than people  
realize.

If you use a DB instead, Berkely DB has some bugs which can  
occasionally occur, and you have to know a bit about Berkely DB to fix  
them.

There are certainly bugs in subversion, but most problems with  
repositories are actually the filesystem or the database that  
subversion is using.


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"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."