These are the very condensed notes that cmpilato took during the ?SubConf Developer Roundtable Discussion which occurred between 7:00pm and 8:30pm on Day One, and consist mostly of the things that the users present claimed were things they wished to have or were currently suffering from in their Subversion usage. Overall, there were few surprises, but it's always helpful to be reminded of what folks are running into.
The session was video-recorded, so we should be able to expand these into more detailed transcriptions if necessary.
Core Subversion Issues
- "In how many other places do I need to fix this bug?". Basically boils down to forward-history searching (successor IDs, copy-to information, etc.).
- Tree conflicts solutions.
- Repository-dictated configuration / subtree-specific configuration. (autoprops, ignores, etc.) [MANY]
- 'svn obliterate', of both the delete-a-whole-subtree and the archive-the-first-N-revisions-away variety.
- Better path-based authz:
- regular expression or wildcard support (so branching and tagging don't require authz file updates when subtrees are supposed to be private)
- facilitate making tags truly read-only (which requires one-time write access at tag creation time) [MANY]
- Performance when using LDAP authentication. (Maybe not core, but perhaps affected by our authz checks?)
- Private commits:
- offline commits okay, but don't benefit from corporate repository backup
- branches work, but require authz tweaks if they are to be private
- authz case-sensitivity (solved by mod_sspi if you use that, but otherwise unsolved).
- SSPI reprompting for auth credentials too often. (Once per Apache child? Subversion creates too many RA sessions?)
SSPI re-authenticates automatically. The mod_auth_sspi module has an option "SSPIPerRequestAuth on" that, if turned on reduces the re-authentication to once per session. If turned off (the default), it re-authenticates a lot more
- Need proper support for blocked revisions in merge tracking feature.
- Support for $Log$ keyword.
Release Packaging Issues
- Better coordination (or publicity of existing coordination) of releases/versions across greater Subversion tool community to avoid version incompatibility (such as when you upgrade TortoiseSVN but perhaps AnkhSVN hasn't released their new version yet). Maybe keep a scoreboard on the website that shows checks/x's for the top handful of third-party tools in terms of whether they've released a version compatible with the latest Subversion release.
- Better dependency documentation on binary packages. What versions of Pythons were bindings compiled against, etc.
