Comments on: Subversion Sucks

By: Kasapo

Kasapo — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 20:11:49 +0000

I just got the same error. The error (for me) occurs only after I do “svn propedit svn:ignore” and tell it to ignore certain directories (errors/ and sessions/, which contain logs and web sessions). It could be the case that there is a commited file in one of these directories in the master repo, but since I’m ignoring I really don’t care.

This (in my case) is certainly NOT a merge problem. In fact, I’ve never seen that message for merge issues — I find that either SVN merges gracefully or has a conflict which is resolved manually.

Either way, I have had a LOT of headaches with SVN that I never seemed to have with Mercurial (hg).

PS: Doing svn update seemed to work, but it didn’t list anything as being updated. I think that’s silly.

By: Kroki

Kroki — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 09:43:50 +0000

For no obvious reasons SVN keeps on telling me that I am doing something wrong, either the file cannot be committed because it already exists or it does not exist at all. And when I painstakingly reloaded my projects in a new local directory there is no way in the world I can delete the old directory. I have to delete every .svn directory individually by hand. Sdelete from Systinternals (now Microsoft) does not do the trick.

By: thimios

thimios — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 14:39:11 +0000

I cannot agree more with you.
I am using it for over 2 years and no matter what problem I am trying to solve,
it achieves to be the number 1 problem generator.
If you do a step in a the wrong order(e.g. committing before merging) you ARE DOOMED
.SVN SUCKS SUCKS I HATE it .
I must find the time to change it with a simpler system.

By: Brian M

Brian M — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 06:15:25 +0000

If my CPAP was running backwards, it still couldn’t equal the idiocy of SVN. I want true PINNING. Give me 3 levels of promotion (dev, QA, release) and let me simply work in dev and unpin & re-pin into QA. When they STAMP it with the seal of approval, I unpin & re-pin my entire QA directory, or better yet burn a DVD of GOLD code and keep on truckin. this “TAGS” and “BRANCHES” stuff is the result of someone with no social life and too much game playing.

By: Bob

Bob — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 18:41:53 +0000

This is a version control tool. The point is to prevent pilot error.

If I was willing to use a tool that required process to make it work I could have zipfiles with time-date stamps. But if somebody didn’t follow all the rules the system breaks down.

Enter svn.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 21:04:20 +0000

Svn is a good implementation of a model of version control which is being rapidly left in the dust — these are not my words, I read them on Joel on Software, but it’s so true I wish I had said it first.

By: tom

tom — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:10:00 +0000

Not pilot error I’m afraid… wish it was…

By: Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:33:13 +0000

I forgot to ask if you have used other version control systems (e.g., CVS, Perforce, whatever) before.

By: Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:32:23 +0000

Uh, are you sure you’re using it correctly?

The error above is what happens when you try to commit from an out-of-date working copy. Just run ‘svn update’ and try again. If there are any true conflicts, they’ll appear in your working copy for you to resolve (and if those occur, they’re not due to Subversion, they’re due to the data itself, and any version control system would require a human-assisted merge at that point).

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ has more information about the checkout-modify-update-commit cycle, and information about resolving conflicts (although they’re usually rare).

I don’t think what you’re seeing is a problem in Subversion. I think it’s (probably) pilot error .