Look, SVN is a step up from CVS, but it’s still a pain in the ass to manage large projects through SVN. In steps GNOME Developer Kit, which is supposedly better than SVN:

“The difficulty and frustration of building GNOME from source is a major impediment for many new contributors. Installing the dependencies, getting the tools working, and compiling major components of the desktop environment is a burden that detracts from time that could be spent making patches. In order to resolve this problem, the developers from rPath have created the GNOME Developer Kit, a complete environment for testing and developing GNOME.”

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