SVN' "complexity" :)

[vvs]

Following recent argument I just wanted to share that anecdote which
happened to me right now. That way it would be closer to real life and
more funny for you.

First, some background. I used to locally mirror GNU APL' Subversion
repository using rsync. That was long before it' Git mirror even
existed. Today I've decided to update it, what I didn't do for quite
some time. I was surprised to see that revisions 1519, 1601 and 1686
together have about 1.7 GB in size! I've aborted that transaction and
decided to fake those revisions in my local repository just to save
disk space. It all failed for different reasons so I've decided to
finally just use plain SVN workspace and ditch my local mirror for
good. I could have used git --depth but this wouldn't buy me anything.

Now, the story. To save some traffic, I did checkout from my local
mirror first. Then I've tried to change the repository URL. I vaguely
remembered that I should use a `switch` command. But that didn't work
with an error explaining that URLs are different. Heck, but that's
exactly why I've resorted to switch! Then I've noticed that there is
--ignore-ancestry, which should have helped in that scenario. But it
didn't help either. Then I gave up and just did a fresh checkout from
a new URL. After googling some more I've finally found a documentation
page which explained that I should have used `relocate` instead of
`switch`. Also, --relocate option was deprecated which confused me
even more. Well, too little too late already :) I've lost 0.5 GB of
mobile Internet traffic, some time and yet I knew that in Git I should
have only trivially changed repository' origin with `remote`.

The obvious moral of this story is: I'm not an expert in SVN. You can
lough. And well, that's the point: Git is just more familiar for me :)

Have a nice day.