Subversion woes

Subversion woes
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

Spending far to much time sorting our stuff with subversion (a version control tool). Having lots of trouble doing bulk imports (large directory structures).

I think growing large directories would be fine, within a subversion working copy. But bulk import is very problematic. I'm 2 hours into an import of 48MB. Things have screwed up at least twice (things copied into the wrong directory, svn hanging, etc).

I half think Subversion is not designed for this and I half-think that my mental model of Subversion is wrong. Sometimes, operations are on the remote copy and sometimes they are on the local copy and I can't guess which is which.

Case one: to add a lot of stuff, I can do an "import" which adds things to the central repository. Which means that, afterwards, I need to do an "update" to get the local copy up-to-date.

Case two: if I "add" it is just to the local copy and, afterwards, I still need to "commit".

Anyway, the worst of it is that after 2 hours I still can't do any real work. I'm starting at this 48MB "import/commit" and "Monitor" is report that RapidSvn is "not responding"; i.e. is hung. MEANWHILE, the activity monitor is reporting that something big is still being transferred. So I have to sit and wait and wait and wait and...