subversion

[adler at stephenadler.com (Stephen Adler)]

I'm sold...

Matthew Gillen wrote:
> Stephen Adler wrote:
>   
>> Guys,
>>
>> I'm in the midst of setting up a project and I'm thinking of migrating
>> away from CVS and using subversion. Does anyone have any thoughts on
>> this, or any comments? Anyone with experience using subversion, if you
>> could comment, I certainly would like to read them.
>>     
>
> Do it.  No question.  We've used it at work for several projects now, and it
> kicks CVS' butt.  Major things that I like include:
>
>  - Moving things around (including whole directories) and keeping all the
> history with a single command is so nice.  (in CVS, that always required
> some repository hacking, and was never very clean)
>  - Checkout arbitrary sub-directory trees without additional setup (a la CVS
> modules)
>  - Branching is easier (both on you and on the server), and branches can
> have finite lifetimes (ie you can remove branches when you've merged it back
> to trunk; in CVS a branch lives forever
>  - Multi-file atomic commits.  ie you have an improvement that includes
> changes to multiple files.  You can commit all those changes as one logical
> commit.  This comes in real handy when you want to revert or merge
> something: it's easy to get the correct version of every file involved.  In
> CVS, since each file had it's own version number, this could be a real pain.
>
> There are other features of subversion that might be nice for some people,
> but I've never had occasion to use them.  Apache integration is one: you can
> use apache as your 'server', and checkout code via an http:// URL.  We just
> use it as a drop in for the way we used to use CVS: via ssh tunnels and
> command-line invocations.  Incidentally, there is a command-line program,
> 'svn', that has the same parameters as the 'cvs' command-line program.  So
> if you can train your fingers to type 'svn' instead of 'cvs', you've
> successfully migrated.
>
> There are a couple things that are non-intuitive, such as the directory
> version status after a commit from that directory, but a) they're minor and
> b) the number of these 'gotchas' is far fewer than for CVS.
>
> Finally, there's a wiki/issue tracking/subversion repository browsing
> package called Trac ( http://trac.edgewall.org/ ) that makes working with
> subversion even nicer.
>
> Matt
>
>