Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jfoutz 3740 days ago
there are two things that are nice about svn if you use it just like cvs.

1, atomic commits. I edit ten files, that's one checkin, rather than the per file checkins of cvs. On a low volume project, not a big advantage. if you've ever conflicted on a bigger project with cvs, it can be kind of a pain to resolve. seeing the whole commit of the other guy is helpful. If you don't run into this more than, say, monthly, it's not worth it.

2. offline diffs. svn has a whole copy of the repo, so you can compare history even if the central repo is down, or you're working from the beach. This one is pretty nice regardless.

svn is a pretty nice upgrade, if you're working with a distributed team.

1 comments

All appreciated, but nowadays my biggest repo is my emacs config, some tens of thousand SLOCs, about 2000-2500 of which I authored (I commit packages I use too, no elpa). And my repositories are local, i.e. they are in /var/cvsrepos. Other than that, I admit that SVN is indeed superior.

I believe that one should use the best tool for the case, not the overall best tool in every case.

That said, I'll give a look at SVN. I can consider switch when I have the time if it is easy to import from RCS, because I do use it a lot here and there, mostly for plain text documents. I do not like maintaining unrelated things in a single repository.

If it's just you, everything is local, it's probably not worth the overhead. Sounds like you have a good, efficient setup.

If you're learning for the sake of learning, i'd dig into git. i'm getting better, but some cases still frighten me.

> If you're learning for the sake of learning, i'd dig into git.

Well, nearly everything moved to git. I've used it for a while, mostly commit/pull/clone. I actually moved to CVS from git :) It's a bit like perl, git, you either need to be an expert at it, or else you can get going, but at the end you create a mess.

> [...] it's probably not worth the overhead. Sounds like you have a good, efficient setup.

Mostly, yes, but mostly because I don't really need that much more than recording my history, and occasionally looking at what I did in the past and more rarely working on short-lived branches. But there are a couple tools that if I ever code them up, I will make opensource. Tho if I ever do, and they take on, I'll use a 'just send a patch on the mailing list' approach. I believe it's easier to deal with. No flamewars on VCSes :)