[svk-users] Is svk a real production option?

[Chris Hecker]

So, I too hate it when people ask this kind of question on a mailing 
list for a tool, but I'm not sure what else to do.  I really don't mean 
it as a troll, I'm seriously asking the question.   I need to make a 
decision soon about whether to use svk as the vc for some projects, and 
I'm getting nervous.  On the face of it, svk's feature list is almost 
perfect for me.  The integration with svn is awesome, the local repo for 
distributed stuff is great, etc.  The only missing thing is 
svn:externals support or something like it, and it looks like the views 
thing might do what I want, I need to look into it more.

But, it seems like 1) a very large number of questions on this list are 
followed up days later with a "uh, hello, does anybody know the 
answer?", 2) the problems that come across seem fairly serious in the 
first place, like unable to merge, or sync, or bad revisions getting in, 
etc., and 3) my own experience with it has been mixed in that I have 
this recurring problem I've posted about where svk st will show a file 
is ready to be updated, but svk up will skip the file, then svk diff 
won't show a diff without an explicit version to diff against, and I've 
gotten no response on it and my next option seems to be to start up the 
perl debugger and try to figure it out myself.  Normally that'd fine, I 
contribute to a lot of open source projects, but for a vc system it's 
not really filling me with confidence.  There also seem to be a fair 
number of replies over the year I've been watching this list like, 
"well, I don't use svk anymore, but have you tried this?"

So anyway, sorry that was long-winded, I just didn't want people to 
think I'm sending this lightly.  I'd really like to use svk, but I'm not 
sure it's ready for prime time, or truly actively supported (the wiki 
seems rarely updated and all over the place, the book hasn't been 
updated since 2005, etc.).

What do others think, including CLK and the Best Practical folks?  I 
hope this is a worthy discussion topic, sorry if it's inappropriate.

Thanks,
Chris