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KDE Switches to Subversion
Michael Pyne writes "It's official, after weeks of preparation, KDE has completed switching their source control repository from CVS to Subversion. KDE is one of the largest software projects to make the switch, and is the first major desktop environment to do so. Some of the goodies that CVS users are used to are still in the process of being switched over (including WebSVN), but everything seems to be working well so far." (The announcement of early April is no longer the operative statement.)
Its nice to see them making the switch. Having used both Subversion and CVS, I have to say that Subversion is much better. I hope more projects continue to do the same. Its amazing that CVS has lasted as long as it has.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
What are the most important features that Subversion has and CVS hasn't? It's been a lot of buzz lately behind Subversion, but I didn't figure it out what CVS has that is so wrong/slow/bad for software versioning
How about you check out the new backend fsfs?
Excellent article with excellent points; On the other hand, if you don't have backups, the same thing could happen with CVS, although the damage footprint would be different. Disk corruption due to bad memory is not uncommon - many people who experience this in Windows simply chalk it up to 'a virus' (even experienced technicians do). If the problem exists for some length of time beyond your last backup, you lose everything modified anyway. In small code trees, it's not a problem, but can you imagine working back through the code tree of KDE or GNOME to discover exactly which files are corrupt?
If you back up your databases from SVN nightly, you're still never more than 24 hours out.
Thinking outside my Head
This is why subversion has the svn dump command (or was it svnadmin dump or svndump? Well, it doesn't really matter) that you can use to do backups of your repository to _plaintext_ files, just like you would use pg_dump to backup your postgresql database.
Obviously, if you don't use the feature, it's pretty useless, but, hey, how often has it been pointed out that every serious project that uses computers needs a good backup strategy?
If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
I doubt they'd use Insurrection, since Konqueror doesn't handle the pages Insurrection generates (it's behind Safari as far as XML/XSLT support to begin with, and even Safari isn't working perfectly with it). Unfortunate, though, since it looks really cool.
" My managers simply refuse to use anything proposed by us, the development team, and named subversion."
For the umpteenth time people. When you say things like this name your company. We all want to make sure we don't have ny stock in companies with this kind of management.
evil is as evil does
The GNOME people are probably breaking out the champagne at this point. :-(
Excuse me!? Please don't spread the disgusting idea that GNOME people would rejoice at hundreds of FOSS developers losing their work.
There may be many "trolls" among GNOME and KDE users, but there are many intelligent people among the devs, who collaborate through freedesktop.org and even joke together, like on April 1st when they made planet.gnome.org point to planetkde.org and vice versa.
Unfortunately, a lot of the alternatives are like, "let's make something new, that's going to suck for the near future until we get the kinks worked out." Sure, they'll eventually become something great but for the present they're not really appropriate for a major project like KDE.
You think that's hard...try and get sign off on something called Double Choco Latte!
My manager at the time had this comment; "It's a great program, and exactly what we need, though I can't tell anyone about it here -- they'd laugh in my face! I'm just not going to do it!" In order to 'sell' it to other groups, we renamed it to "DCL" and swapped out the default logo. Nobody laughed, though we weren't complete enough and someone noticed a reference to "Double Choco Latte" and the begining support simply evaporated.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.