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Subversion v. Perforce. Collabnet replies

Hooks and scales

Having allowed Perforce to comment on Tim’s review of SCM tools, we have to extend the courtesy to CollabNet, his other victim, as well.

Bas Nijjer, director of UK sales at CollabNet, points out that “the BerkleyDB database wedging problem noted by Tim has been addressed by Sleepycat and the enhancement will come with the next release of Subversion”. He also claims that “enterprises are turning to Subversion due to its focus on web deployment from design through implementation”. Well, the ones who like web deployment probably are; and Subversion's open source roots are probably attractive in some circles too.

He is “concerned that the proximity of the discussion on offline operations and the discussion on hook scripts may lead readers to think that hooks are client side operations when they are, in fact, server side operations”. Apologies to anyone who got the wrong impression.

Bas concedes that “Subversion's integration with Microsoft's Visual Studio may be a bit weaker than anyone would like” but, in extenuation, points out its “strong integrations with other IDEs like Eclipse [and] pending integrations with NetBeans and Oracle's JDeveloper”.

Tim didn't cover scalability in his review - it's a little hard to test realistically in the context of a short review. But Bas is very proud of Subversion’s scalability, which is “a testament to the diligent efforts put into a product that is still in its 1.x release stream”. On the other hand, Perforce doesn’t exactly run out of steam on enormous projects either.

Bas noted one omission: WebDAV “which can help the non-developer project member to use version control without having to have a separate client or to even have to consider executing version control”. I think it was mentioned, in fact, but only in passing. You can’t cover everything in detail in a short review – and we think that if we write a book only a few readers will plough through it. We can always extend discussion in here! ®

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