Every ticketing system sucks. Here at Best Practical, we're really proud of the fact that RT sucks less than everything else out there and helps many thousands of organizations around the world get their work done with less pain and suffering.
We're a small software development shop. Between the publicly available versions of RT available and our customer projects, we maintain at least half a dozen active lines of development at any one time. When we first started to do this sort of thing, each merge took about six hours to integrate. That was ok when we were merging two branches once a month....and totally failed when we were trying to merge changes across six branches.
In 2003, Chia-liang Kao (clkao) took a year off work to create a version control system that would let him hike and explore hot springs in Taiwan's mountains and still be able to be a productive software developer. He ended up creating SVK, an advanced distributed version control system which runs atop Subversion, the industry standard enterprise version control system. SVK let clkao mirror remote Subversion repositories, create local branches, hack while offline and later resynchronize his changes with the upstream Subversion servers. SVK is the best version control system for getting your work done while you're hiking in the mountains. It just so happens that what makes SVK wonderful when you're soaking in the hot springs makes it an excellent platform for getting your work done halfway around the world, on an airplane, in a cafe or in your office.
SVK's advanced branching and merging revolutionized our development process here at Best Practical. What used to take us days now takes minutes. We can get more work done faster than ever before. We've been rabid supporters of SVK since its birth. When clkao and I started talking about how I bootstrapped RT into a business and how Best Practical might be able to do something similar for SVK, I literally jumped at the opportunity to help. (And by that, I mean that I jumped on a plane to London on a day's notice to talk face to face about SVK's future.)
I'm pleased to announce that as of today, Chia-liang Kao has joined me as a partner at Best Practical Solutions and we're pleased to announce that SVK is now a Best Practical product. We remain 100% committed to keeping both RT and SVK open source and are excited about about all the cool new functionality we'll be able to offer users of both products.
Over the next couple months, we'll be announcing new support, consulting and custom development services related to SVK and software revision control. You'll also see SVK's website, mailing list and repository move to Best Practical, where we can offer a higher level of service for all users.
You can find out more information about SVK at svk.elixus.org.
If you have questions, please feel free to write to us at sales@bestpractical.com. We'd love to hear from you.