Philips Healthcare at SubConf 2008

Title of the presentation: Tree conflicts: the problem and steps towards a solution

Category: User report

Abstract: Subversion already has many features that make it very attractive for software development at the enterprise level. With Subversion 1.5, merging has become much more easy. However, there are still limitations that show up especially in long-living code and parallel development with continuous refactoring. These limitations are Subversion's current inability to correctly detect and handle tree conflicts. Philips has worked with CollabNet, the Subversion community, and Elego to come up with a solution.

In this presentation I will briefly explain what tree conflicts are, when they occur, and how Subversion deals with them. After that, I will describe the impact of Subversion's weak handling of tree conflicts on our operations and the steps we have taken to improve the situation. I will briefly describe the progress made by the Subversion community in the tree conflicts branch of Subversion, and finally I will introduce a merge helper tool that Philips has developed as an intermediate solution to handling tree conflicts. This tool will be contributed to the Subversion community and be available under an Open Source licence.

Nico W. Schellingerhout, Software Development Manager, Philips Healthcare.