RE: SVN vs. AccuRev?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adam Levy [mailto:adamlevy1_at_yahoo.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 18 November 2008 12:07
> To: users_at_subversion.tigris.org
> Subject: SVN vs. AccuRev?
>
> My shop is considering both SVN and AccuRev (currently using
> cvs). Most of the techies here have primarily used CVS and
> have little-to-no hands-on experience with either SVN or
> AccuRev. I found some anti-SVN propaganda at the accurev
> site, but I think many of the shortcomings they point out are
> either non-issues or have been addressed in more recent
> versions of svn. Can anyone point me to some good and
> *recent* comparisons between the two tools?
>
> Thanks!

Here's another comparison: http://www.versioncontrolblog.com/comparison/AccuRev/Subversion/index.html (which claims to be based on data at http://better-scm.berlios.de/, but I've not checked). It seems slightly more up-to-date, but like Accurev's comparison doc doesn't seem to be SVN 1.5-aware - for example, it describes remote repository replication support as being "indirectly possible" via third-party tools; in fact SVN 1.5 introduced write-through proxying (and read-only replicas were possible with at least SVN 1.4 using svnsync).

Tangent: I tend to think of SVN as being a classic Unix tool, in that it does one thing (versioning), and does it well. It *can* do a lot of the "value added" type things that proprietary SCM systems tout as unique innovations, but it tends to need work to achieve this. For example, a proprietary SCM system might provide a command to list all changes by one user. There is no one command on SVN to do this but achieving it is entirely possible: "svn log --xml" produces XML, which can then be transformed via XSLT into a neat list of ... all changes by one user. Similarly, Accurev promotes distributed development as being an advantage over SVN, which is true - but third party tools like SVK and DSCM integration like Git-SVN remove this advantage. Incidentally, this would be a neat way of grouping changes into an Accurev-style changeset - make a number of commits to, say, Git, then - once the issue tracker task is completed - push the changes from Git to SVN in one commit. (Having said that, I'm not sure ho
w useful this would be in practice - no matter how carefully users group changes, you'll always have the occasional need for rework that gets committed outside the original changeset. I suppose you could roll back the original Git -> SVN push commit, then do another push once the rework is done, though?)

Back on topic: I'd recommend you consider what your needs are, and how much time/money/staff you can devote to each need. SVN and Accurev are very different beasts, and the right choice isn't something I can make for you, anymore than Accurev can (they've already made their choice ;-)

One other thing: if your team is familiar with CVS then SVN is very similar - that may help sway your decision!

Cheers, and good luck - whatever you choose.
John

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Received on 2008-11-18 22:49:17 CET