Anyone use Subversion?

I’m having my first experience with it for a client, on a Debian system.  With a choice between svn and git, we went with svn for the client because it’s supposedly very similar from the user viewpoint to cvs, thus much of my cvs knowledge would be handy when it came to advising the client.

That was the theory.

Setting up and creating the repository went fine.  Adding the project codebase into the repository went fine.  The client’s first major commit failed because .svn directories had become corrupted.  Turns out it’s a known problem.

I set about fixing the problem by the documented workaround ... and ran into another known problem in which svn checkout repeatedly exhausts the system entropy pool and hangs.  I’ve been trying for a day and a half to get a copy of the project checked out so that I can fix the problem of the corrupted .svn directories.

There’s a reported workaround for this problem, too; if svn’s been built to use /dev/random, try moving the real /dev/random and symlinking /dev/random to /dev/urandom.  I’ve tried it.  It doesn’t work.  I’ve tried all the tricks I can think of to try to generate additional entropy in the background, and that hasn’t helped either.

Is this anywhere close to a typical Subversion experience?  Because if it is, I have to say that on the basis of this experience, I cannot possibly seriously consider Subversion to be ready for production use.

Paved with good intentions

Via cracked.com, Bitmines, and paulesyllabic¹, the five most popular safety laws that don’t actually work.

Highlights:

• “Traffic calming” costs more lives than it saves.  “One report from Boulder, Colorado suggests that for every life saved by traffic calming, as many as 85 people may die because emergency vehicles are delayed.  It found response times are typically extended by 14% by speed-reduction measures.  Another study conducted by the fire department in Austin, Texas showed an increase in the travel time of ambulances when transporting victims of up to 100%.”
• [1997 article]  A 1997 study found that in 1994-1995, crime (both violent and overall) decreased by three times as much in states without Three Strikes laws as in states with them.  In eight of the thirteen states that had three-strikes laws, crime actually increased during that period.
• Fully half of the 233 Amber Alerts issued in 2004 were for children who were in no danger.  48 of the 233 alerts — more than 20% — were for children who hadn’t even been abducted.
• Sex offender registries don’t distinguish between serial rapists and somebody who took a leak in public while drunk.  Besides, 95% of sexual assault victims, child or adult, already know their attacker anyway.

And I’m sure I don’t have to point out the utter stupidity behind zero-tolerance policies to anyone here... not to mention the rampant abuses.

[1]  Not necessarily in that order.  Or any order.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Via cipherpunk:

[...] late Friday afternoon, the Obama DOJ filed the government’s first response to EFF’s lawsuit (.pdf), the first of its kind to seek damages against government officials under FISA, the Wiretap Act and other statutes, arising out of Bush’s NSA program.  But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the “state secrets” privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal spying, and (2) a brand new “sovereign immunity” claim of breathtaking scope -- never before advanced even by the Bush administration -- that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is “willful disclosure” of the illegally intercepted communications.

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad “state secrets” privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they “willfully disclose” to the public what they have learned.

[...]

What’s being asserted here by the Obama DOJ is the virtually absolute power of presidential secrecy, the right to break the law with no consequences, and immunity from surveillance lawsuits so sweeping that one can hardly believe that it’s being claimed with a straight face.  It is simply inexcusable for those who spent the last several years screaming when the Bush administration did exactly this to remain silent now or, worse, to search for excuses to justify this behavior.

(Emphasis in second quoted paragraph mine.  Emphasis in first quoted paragraph original.)