Chia-liang Kao, the developer and maintainer of the SVK Distributed Version Control System posted a message to the mailing list on May 28th of this year declaring the end of development for the SVK tool.

I know from statistics that the tutorials on this site have been at least helpful, but am curious as to whether I should take them down or not given the fate of the tool. I myself have moved to Git, which has really good integration with Subversion.

So I’m asking you. Do you want the tutorials to stay, or can I get rid of them?

Kato Atsushi is making Japanese translations of the SVK tutorials available. These are a work in progress. Part I is up so far. Thanks Kato!

I’m a little behind on the mailing lists, but I found that on June 5 it was announced that Best Practical Solutions, LLC has aquired SVK. SVK is a distributed version control system written on top of Subversion and provides the ability to mirror Subversion and CVS repositories to your local machine in order to work in a distributed fashion. It also provides advanced branching and merging capabilities far and above what the core Subversion product provides. Read the official announcement here.

Best Practical, LLC produces Open Source incident response, request tracking, and FAQ management software. Chia-liang Kao, the author of SVK, has joined Best Practical as a partner.

Nalla pointed me to an article called Painless Merging with SVK: An Interview with Chia-liang Kao. In it, the author of SVK talks about why SVK makes source control and merging easier, along with giving some insight into those using SVK in their development environments, including Apple.

I didn’t notice this before (I haven’t really been to the SVK site in a while), but they are actually writing a full blown SVK book. They make quite clear that the book is still a work in progress, but I’m glad to see this kind of work going on to further explain this great tool and wanted to make sure people using SVK (or trying to use it at least) knew it was there.

It looks like the book is being authored in the the same way the Subversion book was written — authored in XML and transformed to HTML. Could an O’Reilly book be in SVK’s future as well?

SVK 1.0.4 has been released. This version fixes various locking bugs exposed by the concurrency fix introduced in 1.0.3.

SVK 1.0.3 introduces bugs to be fixed in 1.0.4 – The recent release of SVK 1.0.3 introduced “insufficient lockings in a few commands” that were not caught by automated tests. A 1.0.4 release is currently underway.

SVK 1.0.3 released. Read the official announcement.

SVK 1.02 has been released. Read the announcement.

James Gosling: Happily Subversive? – Gosling writes about entertaining Subversion + SVK as the new version control system at Sun.