Re: can subversion 1.6 be made "just as distributed as git"?

[Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>]

Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> writes:
> On Nov 3, 2010, at 5:45 PM, MDellerus wrote:
> 
> > I have a co-worker who has suggested that, using "svnadmin hotcopy", subversion 
> > can be
> >    just as "distributed" a system as Git
> > 
> > While I see how this can be done, it hardly seems to me to qualify as "just as", 
> > making this "plausible" at best.
> > 
> > Can anyone give me a quick confirmation of this?  Confirmed? Plausible? Busted?
> > 
> > If this is confirmed or plausible, could someone give me a quick run-down?
> > 
> > (I would appreciate a response, no matter how long it takes, but I do have a 
> > meeting with this co-worker in another 16 hours... (10am Pacific).)
> > 
> > Thanks in advance!
> > 
> > (FYI - I have cross-posted this, just once, to an SVN forum, in the event they 
> > might have a different opinion.)
>
> Using "svnadmin hotcopy" you could certainly get your own local repo, but I fail to
> see how you could easily join your history up with someone else's history using this
> mechanism.

This is only replication, not distribution.

This is the same mistake that makes people say that branching in
Subversion is easy... while what is important is not how easy and fast
is to _create_ branch, but how easy is to merge it.  The same applies
with distributed version control: it is not about how easy is to
replicate repository, but how easy is to merge in (pull) changes from
replica.

By the way, how "svndamin hotcopy" / svnsync works with the fact that
svn:log property is unversioned but might be changed, also for
revisions in the past?

> If you really want to use SVN in a distributed manner, I would recommend
> you simply use SVK.

Wikipedia says that "On May 28, 2009, Chia-liang Kao announced that
Best Practical will no longer be actively developing SVK" and marks
SVK as no-longer maintained, but latest release of SVK on CPAN is from
23 Mar 2010.

Note that http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/article/dvcs-round-one-system-rule-them-all-part-3
synthetic benchmark from Jan _2009_ finds that SVK has very bad scaling
behavior, and would have bad performance for larger projects.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git