Alex Chaffee's blog
(Update -- version 0.3 released 2-Oct-07. Release notes are here.)
We use subversion for our source control. We love it. But we've noticed a few flaws, and a few weeks ago I decided I'd had enough and wrote a wrapper for it that fixes a few of the most glaring ones:
- Externals get messed up pretty frequently. If you remove or rename an external, the old one gets left around on disk, and if you convert an external to a "real" directory or vice versa then the next update simply fails.
- Externals are updated in series, not in parallel, meaning that if you have a lot of externals your updates can take an excruciatingly long time.
- Externals are updated even if they're frozen to a specific revision number, which wastes even more time on update.
- If you want a clean checkout -- say, for an automated build -- the only way to do it is to do a full checkout, even if 99% of the files are already there on disk.
- The
cocommand is not compatible with the convention of putting files under/trunk, requiring you to type out your whole repository URL followed by/foo/trunk foo - The name of the executable is hard to pronounce -- either "ess vee enn" or "seven", but nobody says "seven" except when they're saying "seven up", which is, I admit, a pretty good pun, but come on, how much cooler is it to say, "sub"?
The current version of sub fixes all of the above (except for converting directories to and from externals, and I'm going to make that work pretty soon).
Install with
sudo gem install sub
Help text is below the fold.