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.)

Comments

More switching! More, more!

[Pete]

Great!

Now when are they going to be switching from Bugzilla to Trac?

(insert ha-ha-only-serious-cos-Bugzilla-scares-me smiley here)

Re:More switching! More, more!

[Pete]

Purely because I feel the UI is complicated. Of course I've mainly dealt with it on hideously large and complex projects like KDE and Mozilla, so the complexity of the UI may simply be a function of the project's complexity (or, more specifically, a function of Mozilla's complexity, as it was originally designed for Mozilla).

Note that I'm not meaning to slag off Bugzilla at all - it does the job and does it well, as far as I understand. But I wouldn't want to use it for the kind of software I work on (much much smaller and simpler than Moz).

My team is using a combination of Trac and Mantis at the moment - my boss likes Mantis better as a pure bugtracker, but I'm hoping to convert him after Trac 0.9. :)

Subversion + trac

[gregmac]

I recently switched my internal development from CVS to Subversion, and use trac (there site seems to be down right now) as a front end to it all. Trac is a web based interface (written in python) that is a combination wiki, bug tracker, source viewer, changelog and milestone tracker. It has some amazingly cool features, like the ability to put wiki markup anywhere.

Using a wiki for documenting code is somewhat handy, but what's even better is the wiki extensions trac adds. You can type "This is related to bug #236" and it will make it a link to that bug. The cool part is, you can do that anywhere -- such as an svn commit message. (There's also ways to link to milestones, revision numbers, etc)

I originally switched to subversion for the big features - the ability to move files/directories, and the simple (compared to cvs) tagging/branching support. Trac just made it that much better.

merging

[Hohlraum]

I remember awhile back that the subversion guys said that merging/branching wouldn't outshine cvs for a couple more releases. Is that that case now? I haven't been following subversion development for awhile now.

Oh no!

[Fefe]

I hope they at least refrained from using berzerkeleydb as backend. I know several projects who have lost their repositories with bdb.

I personally have also lost data to bdb, but not in subversion. I would never be so mad to trust my source code to some broken database backend. How are you going to get your code back if there is corruption? strings?

The GNOME people are probably breaking out the champagne at this point. :-(

Re:Why not everyone likes svn:

[DarkDust]

If you work on an svn-based project like KDE which is already run by somebody else, you will most likely be stuck with their choice of backend, more often than not you'll get all the hazards (and efficiency) of a Berkeley backend.

But in this case you don't have to worry as it's not your problem any more ;-) And you're not the one to implement the backup (which everyone with a little common sense does). As a user you can't notice the backend differences anyways (except for a small corner-case: the speed of "svn annotate").

Reasons NOT to do it in an Eclipse environment

[standards]

I know all about Subversion and its advertised benefits, but then again, my organization is centered around CVS and it works for us (despite its well known limitations).

But since I need to reorganize my development environment (new development machines, etc), I'm curious - should I switch now?

My development environment consists of CVS and Eclipse on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac (an amalgam, eh?) ... a small group of distributed developers working on a (currently) proprietary product based around Java and Perl.

I'd only like to convert and clean up my source code repository once every 5 years or so... so is this the time to do it, or am I just looking for trouble?

Re:No per file version numbers.

[aweiland]

Not really. I use svn for personal use and CVS at work.

I find it confusing when working on two files that are the same version of our software and one says 11.2 and the other is 11.8. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me personally.

I find the repository wide revision numbers to be more intuitive to me.

Maybe I'd be on the same wavelength as you if I had learned CVS before SVN.

Re:Differences

[SpryGuy]

Perforce has handled file renames and atomic commits for years now. I'm just curious why Perforce isn't used more widely, as it sounds like Subversion is just now trying to catch up with where Perforce has been for a long time now.

Re:I truly wished they have given a different name

[rednaxel]

Good that you mentioned it. for $50k a year, I'm glad to license them my own version control system, "Rule The Developers With an Iron Fist". It's actually just Subversion and Trac in a box with a pretty logo and some marketing collateral. Plus, a guy with a nice suit and good hair will come and spend two hours explaining things to them in short words and bullet points.

Or they can get the deluxe version for $100k per year, where the guy with good hair will also take them golfing and out to dinner.

It's sad, not funny. Sad, but true.

Re:Differences

[Woody77]

Price difference. Perforce was simply not an option for my small company. Subversion, on the other hand, is just as easy on the pocket-book as CVS.

Re:Here's a good question... Microsoft??

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK they use Perforce, which also AFAIK isn't open source, but costs big $$.

Then again, I may be entrely mistaken..