Moving to Subversion
I’ve spent the weekend installing and testing Subversion, a version management system from tigris.org (who use to be, or maybe still are, collab.net). And, so far, so good. I’ve converted a few projects from CVS to Subversion and, once I’d got used to the different way of working, all went smoothly.
I’ve always used CVS for version control for the only reason that it is the open source standard that’s in use on thousands of sites and computers. It may be clunky, feisty, a PITA to use, but its also solid and reliable. And when you’re entrusting source code and documents to a system like that, reliability is the first concern.
But, as I said, clunky and feisty. And, in the start of a project, a real hassle to use as you can’t change the file layout, names and so on without a lot of work. So, I end up not checking in a project until it is in a reasonably stable state. This is not an ideal situation for obvious reasons.
So, when Subversion was first announced (years ago) it looked very interesting, but nowhere near ready for daily use. Then, last week, they announced the V1.0.0 release as being ready for prime time. Worth a look I thought. Installation went very smoothly (configure/make/make install) and, as I don’t have Apache V2 running I’ve opted for the standalone server, svnserve. Creating a repository and importing a few projects proceeded with few problems (which I’ll detail in another article if I have time). So, now to give it a couple of weeks daily usage and then I’ll see if I want to convert the rest of the projects over.