svnmerge heaven

There are three major problems with subversion.

• It's slow
  
• You have to be online to the repository to do many operations (not distributed)
  
• Merging is hard
  

Git apparently solves all those problems. So says Linus on youtube.

I haven't used git and I'm not likely to at $DAYJOB. It took a long time to convince the developers and system administrators at $DAYJOB to actually use svn and I'm not done with the conversion yet, technical support isn't on the version control bandwagon yet. So there's just no way I'm going to spend another year or two convincing people to switch to git from subversion.

I don't worry too much about being online to do most operations. At the office I'm online to the svn server, and at home or anywhere else with an internet connection I can get through to the office on the VPN. If I'm not online, well, I just won't work. Or I'll work with svk if necessary.

The current full working copy (including branches) at work is pretty large, so an svn status on that *is* pretty slow. Even svn status on just the trunk is slow. But we work around that by avoiding working at the top of a branch unless it's really necessary. Working in individual subdirectories is much faster and the only time we ever need to work at the top of a branch is when we need to see what all the uncommitted changes have been to that branch, or when we need to do an svn log to see what all the committed changes have been to the branch.

For a long time though, I would make branched tags but would not actually do experimental or development branches because, while branching is easy, merging was painful. It could be done, but it was so inconvenient I never tried to do it.

Finally, svnmerge has landed. Svnmerge is a python program (on Ubuntu feisty, part of the subversion-tools package) that takes the tedium and complexity out of merging in svn. The link above has a good introduction to svnmerge. I learned the basics, though, from Ken Kinder's little howto for svnmerge.

I've tested it out once or twice with real branches at work, it works pretty well and hasn't failed me yet. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some weird or extreme corner cases where svnmerge could get confused and do the wrong thing, but I'll worry about that when I get there. I haven't seen any reports of that yet and I intend to stay away from the more complex features anyway unless I really need them (e.g., no bidirectional merge until at the end, when the experimental branch is stable and is ready to be fully merged back into the trunk). In any case, I expect that development on svnmerge will fix any such showstopper bugs before I ever see them since I intend to be as considerate and conservative as I can be when using svnmerge ;-).

I'm very happy that merging in svn is finally convenient. It's been a long time, I've done my share of hand-merging branches. I'm glad that tedium is going away.