Is there any reason for subversion users not to be using svk?

After taking svk out for a spin this week, I’m having trouble thinking of any, beyond “it’s too hard to install because I don’t use a debian-based OS”. Not to say that there aren’t other OSes that it installs on easily, but I’ve only tried it on Ubuntu, which if course required only sudo apt-get install svk.
svk has some serious bennies:

  • no more .svn files littered throughout working directories!
  • we can keep committing away even when the svn server or network connection goes down, and then push all those commits to the server when things are working again.
  • smarter merging (I think; haven’t spent much time with it yet)
  • almost nothing to learn; for normal commands, just type svk instead of svn.

Not to say that all is perfect; the docs are a little thin & scattered. The most comprehensive seems to be the online book which is cribbed from subversion’s - in fact, a number of places in the book still read “subversion this & that” instead of “svk this and that”.

One Response to “Is there any reason for subversion users not to be using svk?”

  1. Hendy Irawan Says:

    I’ve to agree, so much!

    I did my first patch to Rails using SVK. Instead of fiddling around with how to do merges and managing checkouts. What I do is just to make a mirror and [cheap-]copy them whenever I like.

    And “svk pull” is sweet. :-)