svk
===

The strategic strength is that it can trivially and reliably
interoperate with upstream projects using Subversion.  This tends to
satisfy people who need disconnected operation, and so to allow
projects to feel safe about switching to Subversion.

On the other hand it may be a bit flaky in implementation -- when I
tried it (dec 04), it crashed in confusing ways several times.  And
certainly Subversion's reputation for reliability is mixed -- some
people think it's very solid, but I've seen many db crashes at HP.

Being written in Perl on top of Svn bindings may not inspire
confidence.  robertc says he's worked with the libsvn bindings and
they're a mess.  Relatively little documentation.  In general a
feeling of a very tall stack.

There is some fluff about defining multiple repositories, which seems
like an argument for history-in-branch.

Keeps track of merge arrows to do smart merges.

They follow Perforce in not having any control files in the tree --
nice in some ways but you must use the right tool to move or delete a
working area.  (In fact the whole thing seems to be inspired a bit by
Perforce?)  I think keeping just one dotfile at the top level may be a
fair compromise.



(If this is unfair or inaccurate mail me dammit.)