Distributed version control for HUGE projects - is it feasible?

Question

We\'re pretty happy with SVN right now, but Joel\'s tutorial intrigued me. So I was wondering - would it be feasible in our situation too?

The thing is - our SVN reposit

Answer 1

You say you're happy with SVN... so why change?

As far as distributed version control systems go, Linux uses git and Sun use Mercurial. Both are impressively large source code repositories, and they work just fine. Yes, you end up with all revisions on all workstations, but that's the price you pay for decentralisation. Remember storage is cheap - my development laptop currently has 1TB (2x500GB) of hard disk storage on board. Have you tested pulling your SVN repo into something like Git or Mercurial to actually see how much space it would take?

My question would be - are you ready as an organisation to go decentralised? For a software shop it usually makes much more sense to keep a central repository (regular backups, hook ups to CruiseControl or FishEye, easier to control and administer).

And if you just want something faster or more scalable than SVN, then just buy a commercial product - I've used both Perforce and Rational ClearCase and they scale up to huge projects without any problems.