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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.)
Kongradulations!
My managers simply refuse to use anything proposed by us, the development team, and named subversion.
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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.
Monolithic svn databases are vulnerable to irrecoverable corruption
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
Great!
Now when are they going to be switching from Bugzilla to Trac?
(insert ha-ha-only-serious-cos-Bugzilla-scares-me smiley here)
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.
Speak before you think
As I understand, subversion was more or less designed to be the successor (and replacement) of CVS. It's not a big surprise then that switching is a major issue. The users are already used to its methodology (contrary to e.g. linux kernel developers).
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You mean this?
Of course, Microsoft is coming out with their own alternative. It's called Coercion.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
You can play around with it at http://www.sinz.org/Michael.Sinz/Insurrection/
Note that I am still in somewhat active development but the code is also in active use. It can be checked out with:
This is one of the best windows based svn clients I've seen.
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
SubVersion is available for Windows as well.
-- Ravi
Did you look into RapidSVN? I haven't tried it myself, but it may be an interesting alternative to TortoiseSVN if you want support for platforms other than windows.
There's also a Subversion plugin for Eclipse, in case you're using that.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
My managers simply refuse to use anything proposed by us, the development team, and named subversion.
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.
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.
Actually monotone works on windows as both client and server.
Subversion has a client, but no server [for Windows].
What!? That is complete nonsense. Subversion has excellent and complete (client + server) cross-platform support. Linux, Windows, *BSD, MacOS X, Solaris -- you name it. They achieve this by using C and APR.
Maybe you should read HOWTO Setup A Server on Windows.
-Malloc___________________ I want to be free()!
If you have a random corruption, I severely doubt you're going to be jumping into the FSFS repository and tweaking it to fix it.
My solution: rsnapshot. Because the repository is filesystem-based, all of my backup history combined only takes up the same amount of space as my actual repository (god bless hard links). With BDB, the disk usage for my backups would be insane.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
You can choose between a BDB based backend and a filesystem based backend.
The submitter was complaining that the SVN utilities lack features available in the party CVS utilities; such as SVNweb vs CVSweb.
:)
He wasn't complaining that SVN itself lacks useful features available in CVS. There are enough improvements (Atomic commits, versioning of directories and permissions) in SVN over CVS that switching to the new system is compelling.
The utilities don't all need to work now anyways.
Any sort of large-scale migration like this is done in phases. Phase 1, switch the repository. Phase 2, switch the utilities, Phase 3, cleanup
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The disadvantage of the filesystem back end is the proliferation of files. You get a new file with every commit. You need to be careful that your file system works well with a directory that might contain tens of thousands of files.
But you shouldn't lose a repository if bdb corrupts -- you should just lose the commits since the last backup. If you're running without backups, then you'd better watch out for hardware failures, system theft, fires, floods, etc.
Trac provides a nice web based diff tool and a bunch of other features.
SVK works well with subversion, and has support for star merges. The ability to work offline is another cool bonus. On the flip side, documentation kinda sucks right now, but its command set for every day use works in pretty much the same way as subversion's.
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).
... a small group of distributed developers working on a (currently) proprietary product based around Java and Perl.
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?)
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?
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.
" 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.
If you can read this, thank an english teacher.
I'll put in a purchase order for the $1,000,000 version with the $100,000 per year support contract. That's the version where girls with good hair provide on site support.
Then you should certainly consider the $200,000/yr support contract. Then the on-site tech is an experienced fluffer. Of course, on the paperwork we describe her as a network technician, so that she has a good excuse for spending a lot of time under people's desks straightening their cables.
Well depends on how you see it, the devs currently are busy to implement everything which the eclipse CVS plugin can do, which is quite a lot. They are 95% there with small functionalities missing.
Nevertheless the plugin people usually deliver a new javasvn and subclipse version within a few days timeframe of a new svn version, and currently the plugin is pretty much the best svn crossplatform client you can get.
My managers simply refuse to use anything proposed by us, the development team, and named subversion.
Wow, your managers actually listen to anything your say? Crazy. My manager wouldn't pay attention long enough to actually object.
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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.
FSFS