On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Stefan Sperling <s...@elego.de> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 04:27:28PM +0200, Branko Čibej wrote:
>> On 20.09.2012 16:14, Johan Corveleyn wrote:
>> > I just noticed that SmartSVN has been acquired by Wandisco [1].
>> >
>> > IMHO, one of the nice features of SmartSVN's professional (commercial,
>> > non-free) version is the ability to repair broken working copies. It's
>> > listed as the feature "Guided fixing of rare working copy problems" on
>> > the "Compare Editions" page [2]. It does things like correcting
>> > checksums, refcounts, recovering missing pristines, ... (by contacting
>> > the repository of course).
>> >
>> > Are there any intentions of porting that feature to core SVN? Now that
>> > the Wandisconians are involved with that codebase ...
>> > Just asking ... :-).
>>
>> The WANdisconians do not, in fact, see the SmartSVN codebase. At least I
>> sure hope we don't have access to it; all sorts of problems could arise
>> if proprietary, closed-source stuff started showing up in the public
>> repo, even by accident.
>
> AFAIK SmartSVN is written in Java. The feature Johan wants (which I agree
> would be very useful) would need to be rewritten in C anyway to be included
> in the core.
Ah, indeed. So for the core project, the code in SmartSVN isn't all
that useful (unless as a source of inspiration :-)).
>> That's unless WANdisco wants to open-source the whole thing. :) Which I
>> have no opinion of, nor insight into.
>
> That's an interesting question indeed.
>
> WANdisco has submitted projects to the Apache Incubator in the past.
> Being a Subversion client written in Java, this one seems like it
> would be a good fit :) It would need to switch from SVNKit to JavaHL
> for legal reasons, but that should be easy. Probably more of a business
> model question, rather than a technical one.
Another option, which might be interesting to Wandisco from a
commercial / marketing standpoint: factor out the "repair" code into a
separate application ("SVNCleaner", "SVN Repair Kit", ...) and release
that as a free download, with an easy to use, low-bar UI (graphical
and/or commandline) focused on quickly repairing working copies. It
can be open source or closed source.
It might be a great way to spread your brand, get a foot in the door,
... until other vendors start implementing similar functionality or
until it ends up in the core :-).
Just a thought ...
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Wandisco or with SmartSVN in any
way. Just thinking out loud, and hoping that someday a good option for
working copy reparation will be available for users ...
--
Johan
