Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Subversion 1.1 Released

Posted by Hemos on from the testing-the-difference dept.

crafterm writes "Subversion 1.1 has just been released with many new features, including performance speedups, a new file based repository format, localized messages, and more. Release notes are available http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.1_releasenotes. html"

3 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Re:CVS-Subversion anyone? by lonenut · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have worked extensively with CVS in the past, but my current project has adopted Subversion. Subversion corrects several deficiencies in CVS while retaining a very similar command syntax.

    Improvements include:
    - Atomic commits
    - Historically trackable file/directory renames, moves, and deletes
    - Simplified branching and tagging
    - Less network traffic between client and server
    - Better binary handling

    The big missing component at this time is robust merge tracking. You have to do a little manual work during complex merges from long-lived branches, but that should be addressed in 1.2 or 1.3.

  2. FSFS by nthomas · · Score: 5, Informative

    One of the bigger changes that users of 1.0.x will see when upgrading is Greg Hudson's awesome new FSFS filesystem.

    Subversion uses a db-like transactional filesystem to store your files, up until v1.1, Subversion used Berkeley DB to implement this filesystem. But BDB was somewhat of a headache for many Subversion users. Some issues:

    • no networked filesystem - since BDB (along with many other databases) used file locking features that were not available over network shares, you couldn't host your Subversion project over NFS/AFS/CIFS(Samba).

      With FSFS this problem is gone.

    • wedged repositories - for some people their Subversion filesystem would inexplicably "lock up", requiring the sysadmin to run "sdvnadmin recover" on the repo. It was actually BDB that locked up, and sdvnadmin recover actually ran the Berkeley DB recovery procedure on a repository, but most people blamed Subversion.

      This never happens with FSFS.

    • smaller repositories - because it stores deltas, FSFS repositories are smaller than BDB ones. Greg Hudson's FSFS documents claims that "space savings are on the order of 10-20%", but that's a modest claim. I've personally seen myself (and others have mentioned) significantly smaller repos when switching over to FSFS.

    Of course there are a ton of other nice fixes and improvements to 1.1, but FSFS shines above the rest. Also, there are rumors that FSFS will soon become the default filesystem in Subversion, I for one will welcome that change.

    For more information about FSFS, Greg Hudson's original FSFS document is required reading.

    I'm sorry if this post comes off as Berkeley DB bashing, I really didn't intend for it to be like that. To be fair, I think that Subversion put DB to use in ways that perhaps it was not intended to, and coupled with the fact that Berkeley DB is mostly a commercial product, I can sort of see why an opensource project like Subversion would take backseat to Sleepycat's paying customers. (I should probably mention that Sleepycat recently placed one of their employees as a "Subversion liaison" to help resolve BDB bugs/issues quicker.)

    Thomas

  3. Re:distributed systems are more interesting by DylanQuixote · · Score: 5, Informative

    Or http://svk.elixus.org/, based on the SVN and implemented in Perl.