I'm in the process of installing Subversion at Sampa for us to manage our source code. I decided to replace CVS with Subversion because it has more features, and it is a product that still evolving (while CVS seems to be stuck in time).
Now process of installing Subversion is not smooth. This is not the first Open Source software that I use, but by far it summarizes all fear that people have from Open Source:
Poor pre-sale documentation: Ok, I didn't buy Subversion, but before I start using a piece of software I like to know how is it compatible with my existing softwares, I'd like to know how to works (not how the code works!) and how my team can benefit from it. Subversion page is a mess. Too much text and too much giberish.
Poor setup documentation: This is the worst. I had to find information on 3 or 4 different places to get things going.
Poor compatibility: The latest version of Subversion has to run with the latest version of TortoiseSVN, but it won't work with the latest version of Apache because nobody had the time to compile the libraries. Uh?
1-click setup: It takes about 2,000 clicks. You have to edit many configuration files, jump into the prompt and do a ton of stuff to get it to work. And if it doesn't "...look at the log files...". Argh!
Subversion per se is an amazing piece of software. But software is not only the bits that does the core task, but the entire experience end-to-end. Open Source cannot have widespread usage while users are expected to deal with these kind of problems.
What installer are you using? I've installed Subversion on both Windows and Linux servers and my experience has been vastly different than yours. Are you sure you're using the installer rather than the basic binary archive?
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October, 2007
