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Subversion 1.0 Released
Phil John writes "Subversion 1.0 has finally been released. The people who maintain CVS have given us a viable replacement for our de-facto (and aged) versioning system. If you're new to Subversion its feature list looks like fixes for everything that is wrong in CVS, renaming, directory structure and metadata version tracking, file deletion, proper management of binary files and it's pretty portable to boot." According to the download page, binaries may take a few days to appear.
Is sourceforge gonna offer this service in their project hosting instead of CVS now? Or will they allow both?
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
Is there a filesystem that uses subversion as it's underlying "device"? For linux?
Some time ago I worked with Rational ClearCase and the filesystem integration was really nice.
Some time ago Doug Rabson posted a wishlist of features that would be needed to move FreeBSD to subversion (from CVS). Any idea on progress on these features? The site seems to be slashdotted.
SourceForge said in a FAQ (IIRC of course) that they are waiting until a production version of SVN comes out. Now, when will they implement it? I'm waiting pretty anxiously.
And yes, I know that some of you think this is a terrible, horrible idea and that my keyboard should be confiscated for even suggesting it. But this ability is on my "holy grail" list for version control systems, and I won't rest till I find it!
I've been following subversion for 2 years and waiting for it to be ready.
Last build we tried was a couple of months ago.
Try compiling it on different architectures (ours are i686-linux and hppa2.0-hpux11.00), mixing slight version differences, mixing which server you use (svn, http).
Then say hello to _constant_ intervention by someone who has admin privileges to recover your hosed repository.
I hate to say it, but now of course with 1.0 we'll try again. But I wouldn've thought they were a long way off based on our problems.
And this is with just 3 people using it on a test project? CVS has bugged me for years, but it can handle the basics without error.
I'm willing to admit that something we did could've caused all our problems (funny compiler flag or version, wrong switch enabled), but I can't afford the time spent trying to get a superior, but buggy, tool to just do the basics, even if the root cause is in some arcane step in the build process (which is truly hideous).
I wish them luck, but honestly I've never been able to figure out how all these happy subversion users ever got it to work.
There's still time though to pull the plug on our imminent order of Bitkeeper if by some miracle things have improved a lot very quickly.
We replaced 2 huge SourceSafe and 8-10 enourmous CVS repositories with Subversion.
We kept dual copies for about two weeks before feeling concident (only two projects was actully active, but with > 140 developers).
This was in the 0.27 version and haven't had a single glitch!!! And 1.0 is even better, of course.
My only complaint is not supporting locking, but this is obvisouly on the way. Nice for stuff like Word documents and UML files.
GO SUBVERSION!!! Also try TortoiseSVN... it's the best client and integerates nicely with the explorer. If you use Linux, there are lots of options too.
I'm glad to know an informed statement like "Arch is crap" and limiting its user base to "3 brain dead people" can get moderated to +1 so easily at Slashdot.
First, to address your claim on GNU Arch's quality, I'd like to point out that it's not meant as a correctional to CVS like SVN is -- the best description I've heard of it is as a formalization and automation of the development process that the GNU project used before Cygnus introduced networked CVS as an easier but more limited method.
One of Subversion's most important features in my mind is that of whole source patches (I think they may call them atomic patches or something). Good job SVN team (this is in all seriousness; I'd be foolish to wish harm on any F/OSS project). However, they've fallen down in the much more critical area: providing distributed development.
If CVS and SVN are the Cathedral, Arch is the Bazaar. When SCO posted their "Reasons to use SCO UNIX" list, one of the items was (paraphrased) "A single vendor" which most people criticized as being "a single point of failure" and I fail to see the difference in using a CVS or SVN archive. Witness the damage caused by Savannah getting compromised -- what if the same had happened to Sourceforge? (Arch has added GPG signed archives to address this issue.)
The freedoms held so dearly by the GNU project and the FSF are our freedom to make changes, but with centralized development tools like CVS and SVN, third party developers are second class citizens at best forced to get permission from the maintainers to make any changes -- patches must either be submitted via email or the client must ask permission to get added to the permissions list.
I don't like that.
And I'm sure many other people don't -- how many projects in our history have been forked because people had too much difficulty getting their patches into version control? Would OpenBSD have forked if Theo de Raadt could have still submitted his patches to NetBSD? Would EGCS have forked if the GCC steering committee could have gotten their patches in? Would Keith have forked X? Would XEmacs have forked FSF Emacs? The list goes on...
People don't like being treated like shit, and if you're going to treat them that way, expect them to do the same to you. Hackers are just like any other artisan -- they're proud of their work and if you treat it poorly, they consider it an insult to them. You don't necessarily need to accept someone else's patches into your own code, but you still need to respect their right to have their patches treated just the same as yours are treated (just think Voltaire as a modern day hacker: "I may not agree with what you code, but I defend to death your right to code it.")
As for the user base, aside from being self hosting, projects that are maintained using Arch include Rhythmbox, Squid, Xouvert, Y Windows (or so I'm told), and a few others (at least some other GNOME projects IIRC). GNU Emacs has added arch-tag lines to the source code to facilitate a change in the future, and the Linux source code is mirrored under Arch (a change from Linus to arch is pending *at least* some speed increases on large source trees and probably some more support/documentation).
I'd tell you to read some background on projects before making your stupid claims, but this is Slashdot so I don't know what the point is. Readers, please mod down the parent.
-jivera
Before we migrated to Subversion we were using CVS. In choosing a replacement for CVSs' limitations we first evaluated arch.
In our opinion arch is junk. It works only on UNIX like systems (we have lots of systems that are not UNIX-like here, and we do use Win32 for some stuff).
Converting CVS with history looked to be impossible and we found arch very annoying to use.
The distributed tree model is also another problem. I'm sure that for Linux kernel development, arch makes sense. For a commercial product we do not want multiple trees. We want one consistent tree so when we go to a customer site we don't have to wonder why a circuit is malfunctioning because we didn't sync up with Jack's tree or whatever. We rejected BitKeeper on the same grounds; we weren't so much against paying but wanted something with the right feature set.
ClearCase wasn't cross-platform enough and was really more expensive than we could afford and MetaCVS seemed sluggish.
As a matter of personal opinion (mod me down if you want); we felt that (in the lab) arch felt like a toy and Subversion felt like a polished product.
Many of the core Subversion developers are former CVS hackers. If they say the code they worked on for years is unmaintainable I believe them. CVS had fundamental (and obvious) architectural issues which you cannot solve by adding a bugfix here and a new feature there. Sure, it took a few years to make svn just do everything CVS already does, but did it harm anyone? From now on there is a much cleaner codebase which is easier to extend with new features, has less surprising corner cases for users, and makes it easier for new developers to start hacking it.
Although I am still undecided whether svn or arch will replace CVS for me (arch is nice, but its non-portability sucks, and whoever came up with the idea that using all kinds of funky hard-to-type script-unfriendly characters in filenames would make a vc system better in any way should be taken out and shot), I completely support the decision of the svn team to start from scratch.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.