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

[Marijn Vriens]

Chris,

I agree with many of the points you put forward. The list could be more
active, and the documentation more current. Over the years I have been using
SVK extensively and I have been the instigator of many SVN repositories in
half a dozen companies. However, i have never "sold" the idea of using SVK
as a company VC to any of them.

Over the years, I've never had a real problem with SVK, and certainly never
had to drop into any debugger to fix it (knock on wood!). I use SVK, because
it gives me a way to solve extra hairy merging problems with relative ease.
But if it breaks, well, that would be my problem, and as a fallback, I can
always drop back to SVN. Some colleagues have seen me use SVK, and some have
also adopted it as their interface to SVN, others have tried and failed. but
it was always their choice. I would think really hard about the
cost/benefits of presenting SVK as the standard VC system in a company.
Because if you told them "go with SVK" and it breaks for any of them...
well... then now you are responsible for a tool they use all day, every day.

My experience tells me that people and managers like the centralized
one-place-has-the-final-truth SVN model. Whether that is because it fits
really well with the authoritarian Latin-American culture, I don't know, but
it is a fact. Being able to use SVK and mount a distributed system on top of
that central model is really neat.

Of course I don't know what kind of environment you are thinking of
deploying. But I have had success with "SVN for the unwashed masses, SVK for
the power users that need it" setup.

Regards,
       Marijn.

On Feb 1, 2008 2:43 AM, Chris Hecker <checker at d6.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>
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