Hi everybody,
CVS had a (mis?)feature that aborted updates once the first conflict was
found, exiting with an error code. Subversion doesn't do this, which is
perfectly OK, but it also did away with the error code upon exit.
svn's update behaviour is a problem for us in a couple of ways:
1. Update doesn't fail, so it's not always *obvious* (especially with a
bunch of updated files) that something has gone wrong. If you miss that
C, you could be screwed.
2. Update never reports that conflict again. You have to rely on svn
status for that information.
When re-training CVS users, this is a major stumbling block. Especially
in nightly builds (automated or manual) that haven't noticed a conflict
has occurred. Naive build scripts that assume svn update will always
tell them if there has been a conflict (i.e., any build script that was
originally developed for CVS) cause unforseen build failures since if
your build aborted due to conflicts on Friday (leaving your working
binaries intact), it won't fail on Saturday (and will try rebuilding
everything, often resulting in either a build failure or some
semi-silent bug you find weeks later).
Re-training CVS users to use svn status is a good idea, but a long-term
goal. It'd be very nice if svn update:
- reported loudly that updates (current or previous) resulted in
conflicts; and
- returned an exit code of failure if that happens.
Believe it or not, this is one of the biggest problems we've had in
switching over to Subversion.
Joe
PS: Please CC me on replies.
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Received on Fri Jan 6 23:16:16 2006