RE: Is SVN ready for use?

> It sounds to me that there's a very large chance that
> peoples' builds break due to the "Checkin Often" and
> the "Update Often" policies. How do you resolve this?

"Test Often". We use NUnit for automated testing during development; it's
amazing how being able to test after every change eliminates build breaks.
The really cool thing about working with .NET on Windows is that you can
keep the test environment running and still compile a new version of the
DLL, then switch to the test environment and rerun the tests without
restarting.

Of course, on large-scale projects, this is harder to do. In those cases,
though, the stigma of being the one to break the build is usually enough to
get people to at least double-check their compile results. You can also
handle this by controlling the number of committers (ala svn) or adopting a
more rigorous process with branches.

I should also point out that updating often actually reduces the *scope* of
build breaks, if not the actual number. Almost all build breaks are trivial
in this case.

FWIW, we have had zero build breaks since we started using svn.

John C Barstow

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Received on Tue Dec 10 03:12:31 2002