[GD-General] Infrastructure for Distributed Development

[Chris R. <c....@gm...>]

Hi, 

a few former colleagues and I have committed ourselves to work on a pet
project in our spare time. Now, as we are spread out all over Europe, we
somehow need an infrastructure that aids(not hinders) us in this
distributed development effort, specifically regarding game assets. 

As I am currently developing with subversion as a version control
backend, and for the fact that you can integrate subversion
functionality into your program, I was thinking we might as well go for
subversion as a data-storage backend. 

This comes with a few constraints, many consequences and a lot of
decision-making beforehand ( locking vs. conflicts, binary vs. ascii,
etc.. ), but with the ability to embed subversion directly into your
asset-management, you can probably build a version-controlled
asset-management application that might hide many if not all of the
usage complexities of subversion from non-programmers ( explaining how
to "resolve a conflict in an xml-file" over a long distance phone call
is not an option ). 

One big downside is speed - subversion gets very slow as soon as the
repositories grow in the number of files/directories.

But before spending a lot of personal time and personal effort into this
solution, I wanted to ask around if somebody has a more efficient, or
simpler solution. Maybe I intend to tackle the problem from a too
complex perspective ( especially considering this is a spare-time
project ), or maybe there is a open-source/free product out there that
already does what we need, and I simply missed it ... Any
comments/experience/suggestions?

regards and thanks in advance, 
Chris Raine