Re^4: Professional development with Perl - how it's done?

[adrianh]

You have obviously not used SVN's merging tools. While very nice when they work, they often don't work, requiring a lot of hand-merging.

The wonderful SVK can help a lot there.

Frankly, it's much better just to use the CPAN shell to install the version you want to install. Most of the time, installing the latest and greatest will be good enough.

I prefer having my dependencies under source control outside of CPAN. Makes integrating them with the rest of my build much easier, and helps those occasions that aren't "most of the time" become less painful.

[dragonchild]

I use SVK - while better than SVN,
• that's not saying much
• it still has issues

Incompatible changes still have to be merged by hand. Some CPAN modules may change a couple lines a release. Then, there's modules like DBM::Deep that will add and remove whole files and those that stay will be significantly changed, even though the API and behavior that you care about hasn't changed at all.

[adrianh]

that's not saying much

Well personally I think svk's merge support is significantly better than SVNs. I find the trivial handling of mirrors and remote branches/merges a joy.

it still has issues

Yup... I do hit snags occasionally. Very occasionally though.

Incompatible changes still have to be merged by hand.

True - but that's always going to be necessary.

Some CPAN modules may change a couple lines a release. Then, there's modules like DBM::Deep that will add and remove whole files and those that stay will be significantly changed, even though the API and behavior that you care about hasn't changed at all.

All true - and I still prefer to have all the dependencies for my build in source control so I can figure out those changes if/when they cause problems.