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While it's not recommend, you most certainly can run tortoisesvn in a stand-alone setup.

Any form of such manual version control is ridiculous. These days you're even supposed to use something like etckeeper to keep your server's configuration under version control, and for a good reason. It comes with next to no operational overhead and lets you easily figure out where things went wrong. Initializing a git or hg repo on a folder is a two-liner. Tools like smartgit/hg, cornerstone or tortiose svn (all excellent!) let you ignore the command line interface to version control, for the most part. Who the heck has time to muck about with tarballs. If you really need them for distribution purposes, for crying out loud write a cron or hook script that generates the needed files and pushes them to a web and/or ftp server.

The developers at my company, who use windows laptops, keep a lot of their code in VisualSVN server and then use eitherAnkhsvn to do the checkout straight into Visual Studio, or TortoiseSVN if you want to be able to right-click in any folder and checkout to that location.

Step 1. Download this
Step 2. Click through an installer.
Step 3. Create a repository.
Step 4. Download this
Step 5. Click through another installer.
Step 6. Check out your repo.

Wow that was hard.

Tortoise is also cross-platform, for when that's important.

I beg to differ.

From http://tortoisesvn.net/node/58:
TortoiseSVN is only available on Windows.

That page lists clients similar to tortoise for other OSes, but the real, genuine tortoiseSVN is Windows-only.

Sounds good. Also, I'd like to see some of the Versioning file system installed by default, and built into the GUI so that it is accessible and easy for even the common user. Maybe use Subversion as a back-end to make it work, and it could look a little like Tortoise SVN.

1. new people available to projects
2. old people now unavailable to project

I observe that at this time, the increase in new people on the Internet dwarfs changes in either rate. True, the loss of key players can kill a project. Just because more middle-class white males may be forces to stop working on 'F/OSS' will not mean the end of F/OSS. OpenSource is not a business in competition with proprietary software. And as long as a project is Opensource, someone can dig up the old tapes and start patching away. The pool of raw talent is growing. Invite these new people in, they might be able to help.

Inability to upgrade, leads to more intense skill sets.

I agree that manufactures have been dumbing down the documentation. This is done not only to be friendly to the Aunt Mable crowd, but also protect this new "Intellectual Property" that the marketing department has gotten the legal department worked up about.

However, real - or open - standards vs fake - de-facto / Microsoft - standards are published in their gory detail. Many many books are published today on the details of how things work, worked and will work. However, you must go to your library and read them to benefit. Today many people want instahacking sk1llz at the push of button. Unfortunately, the real world is also garbage-in/garbage-out. Those 3rd world folks are required to put in the effort to make work what is just a push-of-a-button away for 1st world people. The difference if subtle: they have to read, you ought to read.

And, to top it off, I resent the SourceForge and all such "organizations". I much enjoy and miss, the days when each project had it's off-beat web-site hanging off of some obscure computer connection, or even hosted by some free hosting site like Geocities. Greatly enhanced the fealing of individuality and added a lot of color to the Linux community. When Sourceforge came around, it so much feals corporate, institutionalized and all the horrible things that most of us hate.

Enhanced the fealing (sic) of individuality? Don't you mean ugly?

Hmmm, let's see: sourceforge provides webhosting and other tools for a project, but how many still have their own websites?

• Slashcode @ sf.net points to slashcode.org
• keepass project's site is keypass.info
• filezilla is hosted at filezilla-project.org
• The TortoiseSVN project has a nice site at tortoisesvn.net
• Clamwin uses clamwin.com
• many more...

And that was just from clicking randomly on the top 10 downloads page. (Technically I also hit sourceforge's own project, but can you really blame sourceforge for hosting at sourceforge?) I don't really see the addition of a useful 'professional' index really impacting the 'feals' (sic) of the projects. I think it's less geocites and more "it's only 100 bucks, just register the domain already."

You still end up at some obscure computer connection for many projects. Not everything is a myproject.sourceforce.com site. However, for tiny projects they get free hosting and some do fairly

We've gone through a similar experience when we grew from a team of 2 to a team of 8 in 3 months. Things we learned to be helpful in the way of tools:

- A Subversion repository for every project, and one repository per person, to host "private" projects. Also, TortoiseSVN for a windows shell integration with Subversion.

- Install Trac for every subversion project. Use it for writing documentation, and for following up on issues by posting Tickets. Tickets help a lot in maintaining the focus on problems and future developments. The integration with Subversion changesets and milestones is bliss.

- Install the appropriate modules for Trac for permission management, and allow your customers and testers to post tickets themselves. Eases up a LOT in the way of issue tracking and fixing bugs fast. It's a great way to have other people build your to-do list dynamically.

- Use frameworks for development. If you're programming with PHP use Symfony for real programming (and not just random code bits).

- Have a shared folder for files.

- Use an appropriate database backend and install common tools for database access (phpMyAdmin, pgpPgAdmin).

- Use the right tools for the job. As an example, remmember that MySQL works well as a fast database backend. But if you stick to MySQL for real applications where integrity and object mapping is relevant, you won't be doing real DB development unless you use views, functions and stored procedures. If you don't have these features, you'll never use them. If you use them, use PostgresSQL.

- Buy a billboard, a big one, and have a handy set of markers available. Do not underestimate the power of a billboard.

These are just things that worked and still work for us. There are plenty more things you can do, but first step is realizing the NEED for change, and getting everyone to work towards that.

Short version is, unsurprisingly, it's good at some things and very very bad at others http://tortoisesvn.net/node/41