No subject

you therefore already have all changeset details in the repo, SVN
doesn't do multiple heads. So you either 'smerge -I' or get all
merged changes bundled into a single commit.

>> and IME would periodically lose track of changes
>> already present and bounce a set of changes back and forth between
>> two repos.
>
>Oh, I've never seen that so far. Never heard of such a thing, actually.
>That sounds really bad. Have you got some reference for this? This is a
>killer!

I could never reproduce it, and it was a rare event. But it did happen,
and was related to doing 'smerge -I'. A 'smerge' without '-I' would
fix it. Nevertheless, it made us try hard to avoid checkins on one
mirror, which to a fair extent defeated the point of having the
mirror. And when it did happen, your history would look horrible.

Oh, and it was also my experience that mirroring had to be done
via a single path. To explain: to mirror, you make local mirrors of
the target repos, and smerge between them. I used to do this
with my laptop. Not having the laptop handy one day, I mirrored the
same repos onto a desktop machine and tried an smerge. The merge
started from change 1 in the 'from' repo, trying to reapply every single
change. Which left my laptop the only device able to merge between
the repos, and me with a sizeable cleanup job.

>> As a plain satellite for disconnected working on a Subversion
>> repo only, it's OK. Anything more fully distributed and it doesn't cut
>> it for me. Mercurial has Just Worked in the same setup. It's a joy.
>
>Well, I'd need only occasionally some disconnected work on my svn repos.
>Probably it makes sense to stick with SVK, instead of loosing the
>comfort of just go on with SVN and the old existing repos...
>
>I don't know yet. So far SVK did the simplest transactions for me. I
>still didn't use it in real life...

I guess if it works for you, and you're not going to use it for anything
more complicated than disconnected checkins to a single repo, and the
main repo will remain SVN, svk is a sensible choice. Though I must
admit if I had to do this again, and Mercurial's SVN convert
(which worked well when I switched us over from SVN) hadn't got push
back to a Subversion source by then, then I'd look at Git or Bazaar. Both
can operate as a satellite to a SVN repo; someone who has tried
both (which I haven't) tells me that both work well, but Git has
the edge in that it looks exactly like a Subversion client. Bazaar
apparently decorates your checkins so there are telltale signs
in Subversion of a foreign source.
-- 
Jim Hague - jim at bear-cave.org.uk          Never trust a computer you can't lift.