After a reasonably pleasant train ride, I arrived in Portland last night just in time to register and stick my head into the SVK BOF. I'm glad that I rushed it to get there. I'm not sure how to give a one sentence summary of SVK, but one way of describing it is as a meta proxy for version control systems. It allows you to work with a CVS, Subversion or Perforce repository using Subversion level functionality, including atomic commits, etc. A lot of work has been done to make offline performance better than Subversion. That's interesting by itself, because it means that you can work with CVS at a higher level of functionality without switching to Subversion.

The SVK team has also added the ability to do star merging, thereby solving the repeated merge problem, which yields functionality at the level of arch. SVK repositories can also be decentralized, much like arch repositories.

The only downside to SVK is that it's written in Perl (some folks will find that to be an advantage). Also, at the moment, installing SVK is a bit difficult, particularly on Windows, but the SVK team said that when Subversion 1.1 comes out they'll work in making installable binaries for Windows.

It's too bad that the SVK folks were only able to get a BOF, because it seems to me that SVK is going to be highly useful once the install issues settle out.

I also ducked into the big Tuesday night event, mostly to hear Paul Graham speak in person. He was highly entertaining, but there wasn't necessarily a lot of content that was new if you're familiar with his essays. During the train ride down, I was able to catch up on some of the ITConversations recordings that I downloaded, including one by Graham. The one thing that I liked about the train ride is the availability of a power plug right next to me. The thing I didn't like about the train was the amount of motion/sway that is transmitted to the rider.

After that, I ducked out to have dinner with some ASF folks. We went to the Chinese restaurant across from the hotel -- something that I never do because I spent a bunch of time in Chinese restaurants as a kid, and I mostly can't stand to teat in them -- but hanging out was more important than food. Unfortunately, this place closes at 9:30PM, and the staff was very pointed about getting us out of there. Needless to say, I won't be eating there again.

It was too early to go to bed after dinner, so I wandered down to the conference level and sat in a wifi hotspot and talked to people who were around. One person that I talked to was P. J. Cabrera, who is working to bring open source to Puerto Rico via an interesting combination of startup and non-profit. He told me quite a bit about the cultural obstacles to adopting open source in Puerto Rico. Really interesting time. The chance to talk to people from outside the ASF and OSAF biospheres is the biggest reason that I come to OSCON, and it's off to a great start.