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Ease Into Subversion From CVS
comforteagle writes "While you have a nice leisurely Sunday afternoon/evening you might want to read this fine article on easing into Subversion from CVS. Written by versioning admin Mike Mason, it talks about the philosophy and design behind Subversion (now 1.0), how it improves upon CVS, and how to get started using it."
Before reading this, let the record show that I am a subversion fanboy. But I am only a Subversion fanboy because it solved almost all of my complaints about CVS. I am not involved with the project at all.
Do developers out there voice the need to store binaries?
Uh, most projects of any size will have at least a few binary files in their repository... icons, etc. But you could store those in CVS without too many problems.
Also, have there been many problems that required atomic commits? Can someone explain why this is important?
Rolling back changes without atomic commits is a pain in fucking ass. Have you ever had to do it? You have to track down every file that you changed (somehow... hopefully you can remember), check which version was the version prior to your commit, and get all those versions of files. For example "Okay, I need version 1.7 of foo.c and version 1.8 of barf.c and version 1.13 of foo.h." It's totally annoying.
Plus atomic commits just makes it much, much easier to keep track of what changes have gone it. This is my biggest, biggest complaint about CVS. File-level commits just make no sense. There is no time, ever, that I can think of when the ability to commit an entire changeset at once isn't better than committing a single file at a time.
Also, Subversions says that it is much faster at things like tagging, but tagging is not a very frequent operation...
Depends on your development process. During beta periods, it's common to make a tag or two per day, and if each tag takes ten minutes, well... it's not a big thing, but it's certainly annoying.
To me it sounds like a great product but I am not able to see a compelling reason why most development shops out there who are currently in CVS would rush to switch.
Certainly not every shop is going to "rush to switch". But, regardless, I imagine that every shop will switch eventually. It may take years, but subversion's advantages are significant enough that in my opinion it will become the new version control standard.
Also note that CVS was crufty and adding new features was almost impossible. Subversion targetted CVS features as their 1.0 milestone. But more importantly, the Subversion code base is a much better baseline to work from when adding new features. So you can expect that it will only get better in the future.