This page describes some of the things I've found missing in Subversion, when coming from CVS:
- There is no way using Subversion to diff a local change ("working copy" in SVN speak) with a different branch.
- With CVS I can do a MFC, fix the conflicts and compare with CURRENT by using;
$ cd releng7/bin/cat $ cvs up -j 1.3 cat.c $ vi cat.c $ cvs diff -r1 file
When trying this with Subversion:$ svn diff $Fh/bin/cat . svn: Target lists to diff may not contain both working copy paths and URLs $ svn diff $Fh/bin/cat svn: Not all required revisions are specified
- With CVS I can do a MFC, fix the conflicts and compare with CURRENT by using;
- CVS provided more abbreviations for commands.
$ svn info --depth immediates svn+ssh://svn.freebsd.org/base/stable/7 $ svn info --depth empty svn+ssh://svn.freebsd.org/base/head
Seems the Subversion developers are much better touch typists (and fast ones at that) than I am.1 and 0 should be abbreviations for immediates and empty.
- "Forced commits" are missing.
When one makes a commit and the log message is wrong (or missing), some shops have disabled cvs admin for users, and instead have use cvs ci -f. There appears to be no way to make a zero-change commit using Subversion.
Subversion import is mostly useless.
svn import should keep in mind what CVS knew - vendor branches are valuable thing. svn import should have been a useful tool for repeated imports of a 3rd party based source drops. svn import could have been a nice feature if had the ability to see what files on the branch were missing from the files being imported - and then issued the equivalent of svn rm on them.
Subversion does not let you copy-n-paste revision numbers from svn log:
$ svn log foo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r325249 | deo | 2008-12-14 01:25:28 -0800 (Sun, 14 Dec 2008) | 1 line ..snip.. # X copy-n-paste the "r325249" as my numbers typing isn't good... $ svn merge -c -r325249 . svn: Non-numeric change argument (-r325249) given to -c
This is a stupid as CVS is in that you cannot give its date output from cvs log as-is as an argument to "-D".
Sean C. Farley < scf@FreeBSD.org > tells me that svn merge -cr325249 . does work. (Sean thanks for the info!) [Though I still think the Subversion parser need a clue-by-four.]
Even sillier is that if I checkout a tree and make several commits from within the tree, svn log will not show them. An svn update must be done first. This is really anonying - even more so when doing a merge.
- Subversion does not automatically expand keywords.
One did not have to do anything to get $Id$ expanded using CVS. With Subversion one must explicity do
svn add foo.c svn propset svn:keywords "FreeBSD=%H" foo.c
At least one can tweak ~/.subversion/config to add
*.c = svn:eol-style=native; svn:keywords=FreeBSD=%H; svn:mime-type=text/plain
But now ones config file is project specific.
- Some error output is useless:
$ cd releng7/usr.bin/logger $ svn merge -c r175993 --record-only svn+ssh://svn.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/loggger . svn: File not found: revision 182510, path '/head/usr.bin/loggger'
That wasn't very helpful in figuring out I had a tripple g's misspelling...
- There is no option at not having base files in .svn.
- Thus you will always take up twice the disk space, and spend twice as long doing a check out or update than you need to be - if you're writing to NFS and your Subversion server is just as well, if not better, connected to the client system. This is a major issue at $WORK...
Subversion does not sort files in svn diff output alphabetically.
I cannot figure out what svn log does within a directory [to understand the output].
- It does not seem to give a combined log for the entire directory (or subtree) as I hoped it would.
- The barren set of 'diff' arguments is quite anoying. The set I often use with CVS are "-u9" to see more context of a diff, and "-Bbw" to not see white space changes. Additionally, I have "diff -p" in my ~/.cvsrc. Subversion has turned this into
svn diff --diff-cmd diff -x -u9 -x -p -c 99 foo.c
svn diff -x -p -c 99 foo.c
Unfortunately, ~/.subversion/config does not seem to offer any relief from this. (Well, you can set "diff-cmd=/usr/bin/diff" and rely on one's DIFF_OPTIONS environmental variable setting, but then diff'ing is slower than it needs to be in the "typical" case.)
- Why does Subversion bother to tell me the number of lines in a commit log message?
r111464 | deo | 2009-01-28 14:45:42 -0800 (Wed, 28 Jan 2009) | 2 lines Merge blah into foo.