My HeadAche with SVN and Tortoise (At Least till I Upgraded)

This post first came to mind after a 4 hr wrestling match with SVN and Tortoise to check in my hrs of hard work. After almost losing my work numerous times, I thought there has to be a better way. Now don't get me wrong, SVN and Tortoise on the surface are great tools, and you can't beat the price, but there something to be said for lost productivity.

So recently, I decided to read the annoying message that pops up everytime I started Tortoise, and it said I could update Tortoise to 1.5 (I was currently running 1.4). Now I've always been hesitant to upgrade software because you are always worried something that was previously working will now don't work (look at Vista for example). But after my recent overnight session with SVN and Tortoise, I thought what do I have to lose. As it turns out, so far so good. I still wish I could force certain updates as opposed to being dependent on Tortoise telling me that these files are commitable, or that the one in SVN is newer than the one I have. I come from using Borlands StarTeam for the past 5 years, and there are just times when the user knows best, and I wish the option to exercise that existed. Also, I don't like the fact that I always have to "Clean" my project, only to get back some incomprehensible message if I can't.

But upgrading Tortoise to 1.5 seems to be working out ... so far. So what have I learned?

1. Maybe it was more Tortoise and not SVN that I was having issues with.
2. Upgrading software can be a good thing, a great thing, sometimes.
3. Maybe that message appearing everytime I started Tortoise wasn't so annoying after all :)

As far as free source control tools, Tortoise and SVN are by far the best products on the market, but if you are running into any problems, make sure you have the latest version.