Thursday, October 27, 2005

Reflections on Tortoise SVN

Eric D's post Subversion on the PC just reminded me howintegral TortoiseSVN has become in our team.

I introduced SVN/Tortoise SVN to our team earlier this year, and I have to say it's been fantastic - saved our butts on numerous occasions, especially when we've three simultaneous branches of development on the same system, plus live bug-fixes.

The only issues I have with it are

1) merging branches can be very counter-intuitive - I've done it numerous times, and I *still* need the help docs open while I fill in the form

2) it's a bit too easy to to get a working copy into a state where you can't commit, can't update, and can't clean up. The only thing you can do in that case is checkout an entirely new copy, manually port across your revisions, and junk the old copy.

3) terminology - if the "Update" and "Commit" menu options were just a bit more expansive (e.g. something like "Update this copy from repository" and "Check changes back in") it would save a fair amount of confusion amongst the less-technical team members.

All in all though, it is a great piece of software - if you haven't tried version control, or if you've only used something like Visual Source Safe or WinCVS, I thoroughly recommend giving Subversion + TortoiseSVN a try.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been using Subversion now for about two weeks.

It really is the best version control software on the open source market.

Hands down.

Ethan Cane
Web Developer

Piyush said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Piyush said...

Yep I agree. We have been using subversion + tortoise + trac for our source control and task management, and I must say this whole collaboration is really very productive. Trac gels well with svn, though setting it up takes quite some effort. But I must say its worth the pain.
-
Piyush S Bhatnagar
Web Team Project Lead

Tylers.Net said...

Anyone know if there are any blogs on best practices of using subversion? I use Tortoise SVN and VS.Net as well.

Alistair Davidson said...

Brandon - I don't know of any blogs that are specifically about Subversion best practices, but you could do worse than start with the SVN book : http://svnbook.red-bean.com/