[Rt-announce] Best Practical Solutions Announces SVK Acquisition - Total World Domination Plan Proceeding Apace

[Jesse Vincent]

Best Practical Solutions Announces SVK Acquisition - Total World Domination Plan Proceeding Apace


Every ticketing system sucks. Here at Best Practical, we're really proud
of the fact that RT sucks less than everything else out there and helps
many thousands of organizations around the world get their work done
with less pain and suffering.

We're a small software development shop. Between the publicly available
versions of RT available and our customer projects, we maintain
at least half a dozen active lines of development at any one time.
When we first started to do this sort of thing, each merge took about
six hours to integrate. That was ok when we were merging two branches
once a month....and totally failed when we were trying to merge changes
across six branches.

In 2003, Chia-liang Kao (clkao) took a year off work to create a version
control system that would let him hike and explore hot springs in Taiwan's
mountains and still be able to be a productive software developer. He
ended up creating SVK, an advanced distributed version control system
which runs atop Subversion, the industry standard enterprise version
control system. SVK let clkao mirror remote Subversion repositories,
create local branches, hack while offline and later resynchronize his
changes with the upstream Subversion servers. SVK is the best version
control system for getting your work done while you're hiking in the
mountains. It just so happens that what makes SVK wonderful when you're
soaking in the hot springs makes it an excellent platform for getting
your work done halfway around the world, on an airplane, in a cafe or
in your office.

SVK's advanced branching and merging revolutionized our development
process here at Best Practical. What used to take us days now takes
minutes. We can get more work done faster than ever before.  We've been
rabid supporters of SVK since its birth. When clkao and I started talking
about how I bootstrapped RT into a business and how Best Practical
might be able to do something similar for SVK, I literally jumped at
the opportunity to help. (And by that, I mean that I jumped on a plane
to London on a day's notice to talk face to face about SVK's future.)

I'm pleased to announce that as of today, Chia-liang Kao has joined me
as a partner at Best Practical Solutions and we're pleased to announce
that SVK is now a Best Practical product.  We remain 100% committed to
keeping both RT and SVK open source and are excited about about all the
cool new functionality we'll be able to offer users of both products.

Over the next couple months, we'll be announcing new support, consulting
and custom development services related to SVK and software revision
control. You'll also see SVK's website, mailing list and repository
move to Best Practical, where we can offer a higher level of service
for all users.

You can find out more about SVK at http://svk.elixus.org.

	Best,

	Jesse
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