Per,


I assumed that, of course. That's why I expected, among others, you - as apparently a knowledgeable person in the topic - will share your personal experience, and not just post a list of features - that can be easily find anywhere. By personal experience I mean, to explain, what benefit did you personally gain by a particular way of using these tools, and what were the expenses (life is not pure gold, is it? ;-) ). Of course, this might include comparison with a KISS "zip and copy" backup system, but what you have written above makes me believe that you never used that for real day-to-day work (no offence - nobody expects you or anybody else to be an universal expert in everything).

A few specific questions/remarks:

What does that mean, particularly? How often do you commit the changes? Do you maintain some sort of documentation via CVS/SVN? In what form, do you try to "help" SVN by documenting in ASCII-based system (such as TeX or some XML-based way)? Do you keep also the tools, datasheets etc. (i.e. all the "externalities" of the project) in the repository? Do you keep CAD design files under SVN? Where do you keep the repositories, locally or on a centralised server, or otherwise? If the server is remote, do you use one single server for all your work? Is that server administered by you or by somebody else? Do you use Windows? Win9x, perhaps? Do your sources span a tree? Or, perhaps, are they scattered in several non-continguous places over the workstation (this for example appeared to be an unsolvable problem when I tried to use SVN, while I had a very good reason for doing so)?

I don't Linux other than hobby, so this is not really interesting for me.

I don't quite understand what do you mean by "shared machines" - are you walking from workstation to workstation in work? (I don't ridicule the idea just don't understand the reason - maybe you do have some expensive software tied to a workstation, used by multiple users?)

The most attractive thing I was promised when started CVS/SVN (and being preached extensively about its positiva ONLY), was support for multiple users working at the same project. I found that the realisation of this is falling very, very short of my expectations. I found it to be very hard to find out, what has been changed by whom, when, how, and why; and also found no tools to enforce some sort of common working culture. I know there are more extensive "collaboration" tools which might fulfill these expectations - I don't know. Maybe we just did not use it in the right way - I don't know. If you can go into more details in how do you use SVN for helping multiple users developing the same set of sources, I would be grateful.


There is no enforcement for annotation, i.e. it has the same value as a simple changelog - both need a self-discipline to keep them useful. And, the history features are in fact compare tools, which do exist outside CVS/SVN (if I recall correctly, in fact, they ARE standalone tools used by CVS/SVN). Again, if I am terribly wrong, please, tell, in which way is this more safe/easy-to-use etc. than just simply zipping up the sources and putting them aside.

Thanks,

Jan