Codeplex + SVN. How good is SVN bridge?

Question

I avoided CodePlex because of it's lack of support for proper SVN and was dissuaded by complaints about short comings. Recently, I have been wanting to port my project from beanstalk over to codeplex because the latter is more social.

What problems have you encountered and how good is the support for SVN. How good is the SVN bridge?

Answer 1

The client side SvnBridge has been problematic for me when CodePlex had client side program. However, they have moved SvnBridge to their server farms, and it's working really well. I have 3 projects on CodePlex, with 2 of them using their source control. Two of those projects were migrated from SourceForge. SourceForge's UI has gotten progressively worse and worse, while CodePlex has been listening to its users and has improved the user experience.

The main issue I have a problem with is that your commits don't get a consecutive id. The id pool is shared with all the other projects on the TFS server that it is running on. As far as I know there are currently 6 TFS servers hosting CodePlex projects.

I'm hosting the source control for one of the projects myself, because I need to add custom hooks scripts for a few things. Other than that, CodePlex is just fine.

Answer 2

Try it first. Set up a "dummy" project on CodePlex, don't publish it, and find out.

I've been using CodePlex and Tortoise SVN for some time and it's fine, but I might not be doing what you want to do.

CodePlex gives you 30 days (I think) in which to set up your project without publishing it. You could easily set up your project, ensure that SVN commands that you're interested work, and then publish or abort.

Answer 3

the SVN bridge is too buggggggggggggggggggy!!! I failed to checkout most projects, using git-svn, hgsubversion, bzr-svn, ... What I am angry is that it fails in the middle with HTTP 200 OK or completely lacks response in git-svn. I recommend people not to choose TFS/SVN option in Codeplex, do choose Git/Mercurial; or switch to GoogleCode or SourceForge if they want to continue to use SVN.

Answer 4

I manage a small project on CodePlex (using Subversion), and I'm not particularly happy with the experience. The biggest issues are:

1. Incomplete/buggy support of Subversion features. For example, I can create a new folder, but cannot move anything into it. The command-line client keeps erroring out, and locking the repository when talking to the SVN server.

2. Slow source control access. Really slow, even for small files. Browsing history is a pain.

I haven't tried more "advanced" features like branching and merging, but from what I've read, it's not currently supported.

So, you can use CodePlex with TF$, or go to Google Code, SourceForge, GitHub, etc...