Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Having spoken with half a dozen people who said "I hate git, it's so 
> confusing" and then after showing them this they go "wow, that's really 
> easy", I figured it might be worthwhile to show people this. :-)

  I hate SVN. SVN projects are so easy to break accidentally, and if you
don't know the exact reason, you could be fighting to fix it for a long
time.

  SVN projects are extremely fragile. SVN has the totally braindead idea
of putting a .svn project directory on each single subdirectory in the
project. (This is very unlike git, which keeps one single project directory
under the main directory where the project resides.)

  For example, duplicate a directory with your favorite file manager.
Oops. SVN doesn't like that new directory at all. It refuses to add it
to the project, or do anything at all with it. If you don't know why this
happens, you are stuck. SVN refuses to do anything with it. (Solution:
Remove the .svn subdirectories from the entire offending directory hierarchy.
Most graphical file managers have no support for doing this recursively, of
course, and it's aggravated by . files being hidden in unix systems.)

  Copy the contents of a directory (and its possible subdirectories) from
somewhere else (eg. update the contents of a third-party library, or copy
the work you have been doing on another platform to the project). Oops,
you just broke SVN once again. SVN will once again refuse to do anything
with this directory. You can't commit, and even an update won't fix the
problem. (Solution: Remove the entire offending directory structure, then
update, then copy the individual files from the other directory, rather
than the entire directory structure.)

  Sometimes renaming/moving things from an SVN client itself can break
things, even though it shouldn't.

  On a Mac the file system adds an additional layer of annoyance. Try
changing just the case of a file name (for example change "settings.hh"
to "Settings.hh") and try to figure out how to make SVN work after that.
It can be a pretty fun evening. (Not.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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