Last week I attended the UK Subversion User Group meeting which was held at JP Morgan in London. It was a long way to travel from Worthing to London for a two hour session, but it was worth it.
I was a little surprised at the number and mix of attendees. There were about fifteen people there and a significant proportion of them were either from CollabNet or were consultants touting their services. Of the others I got the impression that most were either new to Subversion or considering using it.
The first presentation was from one of the consultants. It was by Colin Hood, the founder of the Hood Group. His talk was entitled "Embracing Disruptive Change - introducing process-changing technology such as Subversion into your organisation" and majored on the futility of introducing procedures which are then mindlessly followed and how to introduce change to an organisation in a productive and useful way.
This was followed by Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of Apache and CollabNet who talked about new features in Subversion 1.5, but left the big one - merge tracking to Jack Repenning. Jack was in the USA so he gave his presentation over the 'phone with Brian Behlendorf operating the slides.
The main new features of 1.5 are SASL support for svnserve, sparse checkouts and merge tracking. The merge tracking features in 1.5 will deliver similar features to svnserve.py, but in a far more robust way. However, I was a little surprised to hear that the Subversion client won't be presenting merge information (e.g., the equivalent of svnmerge avail) although it will be possible to write a client script to extract this information. A piece of very good news is that the merge tracking code should (no commitment was given) take notice of the metadata generated by svnmerge.py.
So 1.5 delivers basic merge tracking. It was the comments on what is coming after 1.5 which I found most interesting.
Automated merging is high on the list for post 1.5. Merging a large body of code can be tricky so anything which helps the user make decisions on conflicts is good. A graphical merge tool is needed and a Subversion needs to step through the merge process in a guided way.
Another area is conflict detection and reporting. Subversion 1.5 will show conflict information in its output during the merge. Post 1.5 will record conflict information (presumably in the working copy).
Other items up for consideration are:
If you are a UK user of Subversion you can sign up to the user group to receive notification of future meetings.