DVCS vs. Subversion brittleness (was Re: Moving to D)

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 06/01/2011 19:19, "Jérôme M. Berger" wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> What are the advantages of Mercurial over git? (git does allow multiple
>> branches.)
>>
>

I've also been mulling over whether to try out and switch away from 
Subversion to a DVCS, but never went ahead cause I've also been 
undecided about Git vs. Mercurial. So this whole discussion here in the 
NG has been helpful, even though I rarely use branches, if at all.

However, there is an important issue for me that has not been mentioned 
ever, I wonder if other people also find it relevant. It annoys me a lot 
in Subversion, and basically it's the aspect where if you delete, 
rename, or copy a folder under version control in a SVN working copy, 
without using the SVN commands, there is a high likelihood your working 
copy will break! It's so annoying, especially since sometimes no amount 
of svn revert, cleanup, unlock, override and update, etc. will fix it. I 
just had one recently where I had to delete and re-checkout the whole 
project because it was that broken.
Other situations also seem to cause this, even when using SVN tooling 
(like partially updating from a commit that delete or moves directories, 
or something like that) It's just so brittle.
I think it may be a consequence of the design aspect of SVN where each 
subfolder of a working copy is a working copy as well (and each 
subfolder of repository is a repository as well)

Anyways, I hope Mercurial and Git are better at this, I'm definitely 
going to try them out with regards to this.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer