svk—a distributed Subversion client by Chia Liang Kao and company—is now an essential part of my daily workflow. I’ve been using it almost exclusively for the past year on the main projects that I work with, and it’s fantastic being able to code when you’re on the road and do offline commits, syncing back to the main tree when you’re back online. Users of other distributed revision control systems do, of course, get these benefits, but svk’s ability to work with existing Subversion repositories is the killer reason to use it. (I’m aware that Bazaar has some Subversion integration now, but it’s still considered alpha, whereas svk has been very solid for a long time now.)

The ability to do local checkins with a distributed revision control client has a nice side-effect: commits are fast. They typically take around two seconds with svk. A checkin from a non-distributed revision control client such as Subversion requires a round-trip to the server. This isn’t too bad on a LAN, but even for a small commit, it can take more than 10 or 15 seconds to a server on the Internet. The key point is that these fast commits have a psychological effect: having short commit times encourages you to commit very regularly. I’ve found that since I’ve switched to svk, not only can I commit offline, but I commit much more often: sometimes half a dozen times inside of 10 minutes. (svk’s other cool feature of dropping files from the commit by deleting them from the commit message also helps a lot here.) Regular commits are always better than irregular commits, because either (1) you’re committing small patches that are easily reversible, and/or (2) you’re working very prolifically. Both of these are a win!

So, if you’re still using Subversion, try svk out just to get the benefits of this and its other nifty features. The svk documentation is quite sparse, but there are some excellent tutorials that are floating around the ‘net.