So after investigating, I found “Fossil” — written (and used by) the guy who wrote SQLite. Check it out here: http://www.fossil-scm.org/ . It is free, robust, and easier to use than SVN in many regards. It is a cinch to set up on a server. Doesn’t pollute your directories (just a couple files in the root of your working set, not part of the actual check in).

It’s not as fast as “git”. But it is *much* easier to understand and deploy, and it works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS/X (among others).

“You didn’t even mention the wonderful dumpfile hell…”

Ah yes, svndumpfilter. What a fantasmagorical source of bliss that tool is. Just type the words “svndumpfilter” and “impossible” into google to get an idea of the playground that is svndumpfilter. And don’t wait up for those insane error messages, perfection takes time.

Many people also seem to have a hard time with branches, or tags, or whatever. The basic idea is that SVN thinks of things in terms of a **LINUX** filesystem. All files are case-sensitive. Paths to files are stored, and those paths can change over time and the files (technically part of the path) can also be changed, but all the history sticks with it (provided you’re smart enough to tell SVN that you’ve renamed the file, instead of just renaming it and deleting the old one). When you start trying to use it on a case-INsensitive filesystem such as those used by Windows, you can run into problems if someone starts creating files with mixed-cases… for instance: if you create FileName.GIF, and another person manages to rename it “filename.Gif”, someone will invariably have problems because SVN tries to rename your local file but the Windows filesystem won’t allow it. Try creating a file on your Windows machine like “FileName.GIF” and then make it all lowercase… good luck. The Linux part of the equation is important: on a Linux webserver, if you pull up “http://crazedsanity.com/images/dev-logo.gif”, then try “http://crazedsanity.com/images/dev-LOGO.gIf”, you will get an error as the files aren’t the same. I’m not sure how IIS handles this, but Linux is very case-sensitive. You can literally have the two afore-mentioned files (“dev-LOGO.gIf” and “dev-logo.gif”) sitting side-by-side without a problem, but Windows can’t. If someone in Linux added and committed files like that, the Windows developer would have all kinds of problems.

As far as merging, or branching, or tagging, or whatever you want to call it: its all just folders. Create a copy of one folder and you’re just creating another folder. The repository stores them in a very efficient manner. If you create a branch off “trunk” (a commonly used term, but **not** required): create it on the repository side so the server does all the work. When you want to work on that branch, use “svn switch” to change your workspace to point to that branch and have all the data from that branch: it will only change files that need to be changed and leave everything else. If you do the switch with local changes, you might be in for some trouble, but the developers of SVN kinda assume that you’re smart enough to know what you’re doing.

And finally, don’t go freaking out about how bad Subversion is when you haven’t read the book or you’re using some shitty program to work with it. If you’re using Eclipse, checkouts and commits will take extra long, but that has **NOTHING** to do with the repository and **EVERYTHING** to do with the code that is doing the interacting. I can do a checkout through TortoiseSVN or Linux CLI 10 times faster than Eclipse. If you start bitching about Subversion, make sure your problem is **actually** Subversion and not PEBKAC or some middleware you’re using.

I have used SVN a few years ago because our group changed to it because it was free. After about 6 months of using it we voted and swtiched back to Perforce because: “It just works”. That is all a developer really wants out of their SCM.

Now I am using SVN again in a new role. Not surprisingly, after over 5 years away from SVN and only about 30 minutes into using it to move a small directory structure around and it has shat upon itself again. I once again find myself copying my materials to another folder, deleting the SVN-protected folders, checking out the files again, and copying my changed files into place. This is an occurrence that happens all the time, and is completely unacceptable for an SCM. Not to mention that it costs me a ton of productivity! I have never had to do this with any other SCM.

I am in the Enterprise Software development world. Much of the coding we do is centered around ensuring that errors don’t occur or are gracefully handled. That is where SVN falls flat on its face. It just doesn’t give a crap if you didn’t read the precious manual perfectly because you had real work to do. Now I am forced to read a 383 manual for something that should be intuitive to some degree. I have a feeling that even after RTFM I will still feel the same way… probably worse as I will have wasted 1-2 days of my life reading a stupid SCM manual after over 15 years in the business. That is what is retarded about SVN. Clearly by looking at the posts on this site and others there are a ton of people who agree.

Git, Mercurial, Subversion, Bazaar plus many commercial products all have their place. The general problem with DVCS at present is their immaturity. Basically toys at present for girls and boys still in the bike lane.

If a file is modifed or even some text appended at the last of the file it shows a conflict ,I am bored of solving the conflicts
Will throw up the svn and may be have a look at Git or so

Sure you can find something even more crappy than SVN, but if you do
not think that SVN sucks, you clearly have not tried anything that has
a clear and solid design such as Git.

SVN, being released about 15 years later after CVS, offers very little
improvement over its predecessor (or more precisely it does offer some
improvements but they are complemented by some other features such as
slowness, mind-boggling tags/branches implementation, etc…).

So, while SVN may not be the worst VCS out there, it will always remain
the momentum of mediocrity. Whoever wrote that system apparently slept
during the classes where the difference between version control systems
and revision file systems was explained, or why you never want to use a
database to implement a file system over it… and that is only the
beginning of the long list of mistakes…

Looking at SVN, it is difficult to believe that it was meant as a clean
replacement to CVS, which has been developed for years. If you want to
know what difference a clean and solid design can make, I will give you
one:

It took about two years for Subversion to become self-hosted, and it was
only 5 days for Git to become self-hosted, and two weeks later it already
hosted the Linux kernel and was capable of doing merge, something that
SVN still has not learned to do correctly.

And anyone who think that SVN is capable of merge are welcome to try –
get something that uses merge a lot, like the Linux kernel, and try to
repeat that in SVN. Good luck with that! (I am sure you will find
something new and interesting to add to already lo-o-ong list of merge
related bugs in Subversion).

Yet, looking at what crappy VCSes are still used in the corporate world,
I believe that SVN got a chance there, and its developers can continue
to write books like “ScrewVersioN: a new generation of SubVerisoN”…
So far, they got more success with writing books than code…

This client is too old to work with working copy xyz’. You need
to get a newer Subversion client, or to downgrade this working copy.

I havent changed svn version on the server and my client version neither.
It just appears from time to time and it really freaks me out :/

Also, it’s really sucks that changes are not updated/reflected even if you commit the changes 5 mins ago, it still shows RED in windows explorer, which means still changes not commmited . This really makes me, a developer , more than mad with SVN.

SVN can also be fast – Berkeley DB is one of the fastest database in the world – but only need a dam-good-fast hardware with Tera Byte disks. To keep the SVN in reins You need to freeze the code once a week – to avoid any database problem too.

I prefer basic clearcase for all proposes is one of the most logic, easy to learn and use and really fast. All versions are easy available due special file-system.

I’m not recommends UCM – why – it is too powerful – with this power – too complicated for developers which causes many administration problems.

I’m not recommends Dimensions – has totally different point of view – un-logical, hard to administrate, very slowwwww, and is poor comparing to base clearcase.