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Subversion Hits Alpha

Posted by timothy on from the bang-on-it-if-that's-your-thing dept.

C. Michael Pilato writes: "This overheard while eavesdropping on announce@subversion.tigris.org: Gentle coders, The ever-growing cadre of Subversion developers is proud to announce the release of Subversion 'Alpha' (0.14.0). Since we became self-hosting eleven months ago, we've gone through ten milestones. This milestone, however, is the one we've always been working towards; it's a freeze on major features for our 1.0 release. From here out, it's mostly bug-fixing. We hope this announcement will lead to more widespread testing; we welcome people to try Subversion and report their experiences on our development list and issue tracker." Subversion, a source control system akin to CVS, has been in the works for a couple of years now.

12 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. In 20 words or less. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Tell me what has Subversion got that CVS hasn't? (No this is not a flame, I'd like to know).

    1. Re:In 20 words or less. by ebuck · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One odd aspect comes to mind directly, modifications to CVS code must be made in two places to have effect.

      Modify it once to support the old "there's no network" calls. Modify it again to support the added on "network enabling code".

      For most users this is not a visible issue, that is until:

      1. You issue a command via network and it doesn't act like a command when you're in the box.
      2. You want to know why #1 happens.

      Yes, you can argue that having a web server is extra overhead, but that burden is being supported by people who worry about web servers full time, not by those who worry about source code control. And if you're not using a network, why the extra overhead of CVS? RCS would remove the network overhead entirely.

    2. Re:In 20 words or less. by ftobin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      CVS uses [kgnp]server (Kerberos, GSSAPI, NTLM, Password) as its communication protocol. It's not even encrypted.

      Noone in their right minds uses this.

      The cvs-over-[rs]sh thing is a kludge, an extension of the local repository access.

      It's a 'kludge' that works extremely well, and fits well into the unix philosophy.

      It requires each person have a Unix shell account with write access to the repository. You can't do much security-wise with that.

      False. It requires that they have an account on the system, not one necessarily that allows you to execute a shell (just like SourceForge has it set up).

      Since CVS stores each file independently, you can at least say they don't have access to a module but you can't say they don't have access to a certain branch. And you certainly can't say something like "they can't delete/modify existing revisions".

      True. But this has little to do with the transport protocol.

  2. Re:Why? by Peyna · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Isn't Source-Safe expensive?

    --
    What?
  3. while we're at it, let's burn our Makefiles too by soundsop · · Score: 2, Interesting

    While we're considering throwing away CVS, let's also throw out make. Check out Scons, a replacement for make. I have been using it for a few months on small projects and it's shaping up to be a really great tool.

    Burn your Makefiles!

    1. Re:while we're at it, let's burn our Makefiles too by smagoun · · Score: 4, Interesting
      ...and there's always ant, from the folks over at jakarta.apache.org. It's aimed at java development, but can be used with other languages as well.

      Ant has some pretty cool features (and a few misfeatures, sadly), but it's really caught on in Java-land.

  4. Re:Why? by Storm+Damage · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Only $500/seat? Good lord how I wish our versioning software was that cheap. Right now I'm writing a Purchase Request for 4 more Rational ClearCase licenses...

    When the license + 1 year support for each is all added up, we'll be cutting a check to the tune of about $16,000

    I've asked the CM people before why we're not using something cheap (free) like CVS (as the sysadmin, I don't get to make the decisions, I just get to make it work once the stuff is purchased), and they casually said "Hell, I don't know, that's just what we're stuck with."

    I guess "Hell, I don't know, that's just what we're stuck with" is an appropriate attitude when you've got oodles and oodles of taxpayer dollars to spend...

    I know, I know. I'm going to hell.

  5. versus jakarta slide? by awb131 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does anyone know how subversion compares with Slide from the Jakarta Project? Slide is also a WebDAV/DeltaV client and server. In the past, I've been more interested in Slide because it has a more "pluggable" back end (Slide is in Java, and I am a pretty good Java programmer, not so much with the C.) Easier to embed/extend for my own uses.

    For example, are the two interoperable in any way? Can you use one's client to talk to the other?

    --
    "There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
  6. Seems like too much baggage by SilentTristero · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We use CVS here, and like everyone else I'm fed up with the lack of rename support and branching. But looking at the install requirements of Subversion is very intimidating! It requires:
    - Berkeley DB, a particular version (this makes sense)
    - Apache 2.x
    - WebDAV
    - Neon
    and a bunch of other stuff, IIRC. (Their site is /.ed, so I can't check, sorry)
    All we need at my company is a server to run on one Linux machine and clients for all the others (MacOSX/WinXP/Linux/IRIX), all within our firewall.

    Doesn't all the above stuff, especially the Apache/WebDAV/Neon stuff, seem like overkill just to implement a network protocol for a version control system? Setting up a CVS server is certainly not this complicated, and it seems like with a little more effort on the developers' part, much end-user time and pain could be saved. Does Apache/WebDAV/Neon really buy enough so it's worth the install&admin overhead?

    I'm not trying to rag on the Subversion developers; it looks like a really cool system, once you get it up & running. It also looks like they've really done a great job of meeting their goals. I'm definitely looking forward to checking it out -- as soon as I have enough time.

  7. I've been using Subversion for three months... by Ludwig668 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ... and have been really happy with it. Setting it up is a thesis project (the most common problem with software that's free) but once that was done, it works beautifully.

    SCC works well for several purposes:
    • Backup--I save everything in a personal 'svndocs' directory; including stuff like quicken databases, word documents, all that stuff. Just 'svn commit' (or in my previous life, 'cvs commit') and you have your backup stored on another computer. I had a laptop die at a customer's site, and it took downloading the client and 20 minutes to resume development on another computer. My brownie point score soared.
    • Share files with customers which are far away. SCC acts like a low-bandwidth file server. There are suddenly no hassles putting together installers and such; so the rate at which you can deploy updates greatly increases. CVS really sucks when it comes to directory versioning, that's why I switched to SVN. I can now configure the whole deployment tree on my side, and don't have to start e-mails with 'well, because CVS can't do this, you need to delete the whole project and check out over again.' Monkeying around with directories is much more important, considering the way that ant relies on java files being in directories which correspond to their package names.
  8. Re:That's obvious!! by Feign+Ram · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Kee -Rect ! The VFS used by Clearcase while providing a lot of it's cool features is also responsible for many drawbacks, including some of the ones you mention.

    Scalability is the biggest downstream issue any manager has to consider before choosing Clearcase. It is extremely resource hungry and I used to work for a small company that deployed a Sun Enterprise server to support CLearcase for just 10-15 developers. Get ready with barrels of memory - shticks and drives.

    The Steep learning curve is not something that u can wish away in a production environment.

    In spite of all this, I remain fond of Clearcase - It was the first Version Control/Configuration System I used seriously and haven't found anything even remotely similar in terms of functionality. I felt like vomiting when I first used CVS after 4 years of CVS. Another nice feature is it integrates nicely with other Rational products like ClearDDTS the bug tracking system - Against a specific ticket you can check the list of related checkins/checkouts.

    It was originally developed by a company called Atria and was later taken over by Rational.

    And don't forget multisite. A Pig it is - but it provided lot of value for money, especially to comapnies that could afford it.

  9. Re:arch vs Subversion by millette · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Seriously, if we had a good enough filesystem, there wouldn't be a need for any db. It's only a question of point of view. You mention using standard database tools to manage subversion. What's so wrong about standard filesystem tools to manage arch then? You know, like cat and grep, and ls even. (Please, don't point out that grep isn't a filesystem tool, please).