On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Subversion - 4-6 hours (depends on a multitude of packages and will
>>> only work with specific versions which you
>>> learn about the hard way at build time).
I have seen one of these nightmare Subversion installs before so I can
attest to the fact that they happen. Was close to two days actually.
Hours spent just trying to sort out which version of apr, neon, etc. all
worked right. The versions that shipped with the OS were broken, trying
to use the whole Subversion dependency bundle introduced "which version am
I linking with now?" issues and even that set wasn't completely
consistant. Complete disaster all around.
That said, I think that's an exceptional case due to using a Linux
distribution that should have been retired already, but dismissing the
wild Subversion build dependency tree problem as FUD would be wrong. It
happens.
> For those on platforms where SVN comes prepackaged, this might not be
> a big problem (except maybe for pulling in packages they don't want).
> For other developers this kind of thing could be a showstopper.
It's only recently that I started getting prepackaged SVN versions that
were new enough to be completely useful included with the Linux
distributions I use. The only thing that's saved me on RHEL4 are the RPM
packages at summersoft.fay.ar.us, and even for those you have to pull down
many packages and install them just right.
As others have pointed out this is really kind of moot. Subversion is
really only a small step forward from CVS and it has merge issues that
make it less suitable the larger the number of developers there are. As
much as I'd like to move off of CVS, if the forward step is Subversion I'd
say why bother; too much work for a small gain.
--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD