[darcs-users] svk

[Florian Weimer]

* John Goerzen:

> Have any of you looked at svk?
>
> http://svk.elixus.org/
>
> From my initial glance, it looks like it's quite similar to darcs, but
> based on the Subversion FS.

It works quite well for my purposes.  Branching and merging is rather
straightforward, and works well in most cases.  It's reasonably fast
(except for startup time, so it's not recommended to use it in the
inner loop of some script).  It doesn't clutter your working copy with
metadata (unlike tla, plain Subversion and CVS).  The command set is
quite intuitive for a CVS user.

Downsides are occasional cryptic error messages (but unlike tla, I've
only seen once that internal data structures were corrupted), and I
feel that merge tracking based on merge tickets might give you poor
results in complex topologies.

Most of my merging tasks involves merging new upstream releases into
my little local fork (or Debian package), and I must say that svk
handles this one pretty well.  arch would be fine, too, but the way it
decides which files are part of the project tree is still mysterious
and gives me endless headaches.  What's worse, tla apparently is
unmaintained.

Coincidentally, I've got a similar problem with darcs: There doesn't
seem to be an easy and reliable way to tell which files in my working
copy are under revision control and which aren't (like "svn status" or
"svk status", or the "cvs update" output).