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Apache Subversion To WANdisco, Inc: Get Real
kfogel writes "The Apache Subversion project has just had to remind one of its corporate contributors about the rules of the road. WANdisco, Inc was putting out some very odd press releases and blog posts, implying (among other things) that their company was in some sort of steering position in the open source project. Oops — that's not the Apache Way. The Apache Software Foundation has reminded them of how things work. Meanwhile, one of the founding developers of Subversion, Ben Collins-Sussman, has posted a considerably more caustic take on WANdisco's behavior."
At work we switched from Subversion to Mercurial last year, after repeated difficulties merging branches back into the trunk with SVN. The "killer feature" of SVN over CVS was supposed to be the ability to move files and directories around without doing it by hand in the repository itself. However, the moment you start doing this in a branched repository - or worse still, delete files and directories - you're into a world of hurt. The guy who wrote the existing branch/merge support has acknowledged it's inadequate[1], while the remaining SVN developers have been promising to fix it in the next version, for about the last four or five major versions. Since switching to Mercurial, we have had a reasonably large branch that was reintegrated into trunk with none of the problems we had with SVN. We've found the tools at least as good as those available for SVN, with various team members using the Mercurial command line client, NetBeans plugin and TortoiseHg.