I’ve seen already three different developers asking on IRC: “Why do you use Subversion in the Trolltech labs to publish your source code, instead of $FAVOURITE_REV_CTRL_SYSTEM?”. To make everyone’s life easier I thought I’d just answer the question here :)
The two main arguments are simple:
- It’s portable. It runs well on Linux, OS X, Windows and more. That’s a must for us.
- It’s easy to use. It’s really simple to use for our purpose and the documentation is very good, too.
Now it may not be as powerful as $YOUR_FAVOURITE, but that’s not really important for us, because we use it just to share source code. The actual development happens in our Perforce repository, and we use a little script to automatically convert the individual Perforce changesets to Subversion. That’s convenient for us.
But Subversion can also be very convenient for you! If you’re an open source software developer using Subversion then it’s really easy for you to use a project we have in the Trolltech labs in your program through svn:externals. You can include a reference to a project in our Subversion repository in your SVN hosted project and it will be automatically checked out and updated along with your code. This way you don’t have to copy of the sources yourself.
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6 comments
Where can we find Subversion in these labs (url?)?
As a user of both Perforce and Subversion, I’m curious: What do you guys use in Perforce that isn’t available in Subersion? Or is it just momentum?
I would bet that’s because Perforce is written in Qt
Steven: Perforce triggers for one thing. (Yes, I know about the pre-commit hook in Subversion)
It allows us on the server-side to provide different submit templates to fill in depending on the level a branch is in. For example, non-restricted branches use the default template, while more restricted branches may ask which bug/task a change fixes, who reviewed the change, a summary and details about the change, etc. Things that makes life easier when backtracking issues.
On top of that Perforce has actually working merge tracking, which Subversion unfortunately hasn’t. In other words: Branching is a no-brainer in Perforce, branching and branch-tracking with Subversion is painful (svnmerge doesn’t really cut it compared to p4 integrate).
On a personal note I’m not a big fan of Perforce myself. But that’s just my humble opinion.
I haven’t played with either of those features yet in Subversion, but I imagine I’ll need to sooner or later. Thanks for the info.
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