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Performance Tuning Subversion
BlueVoodoo writes "Subversion is one of the few version control systems that can store binary files using a delta algorithm. In this article, senior developer David Bell explains why Subversion's performance suffers when handling binaries and suggests several ways to work around the problem."
release management - you can store _compiled_ application bundles, ready-to-go.
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putting a toolchain under CM control, so that you can go back to not only an earlier version of your own code, but the version of the toolchain you used to compile the code at that point in time. Absolutely necessary to be able to recreate the full software environment of a past build, without relying on that version of the toolchain still being publicly available (not to mention including any patches/mods you made to the public toolchain).
You ever try to move a directory structure full of source code from one place to another in CVS -- or even to move or rename a single file...?
HINT: When you do it the way CVS provides, you will lose all of your revision history.
SVN does not have this fatal flaw.
Plus if the master connection is set to compress data ( -C ) , then you get transparent compression.
Now if only I could expand all this to fit 2 pages....Profit!!!
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
For many open source projects, finding good documentation is hard. In the case of Subversion, it couldn't be easier. In fact, the Subversion team has taken documentation to such a level that they should be considered THE model for documentation in the open source community. They have written a book (published in print by O'Reilly, but maintained and posted for free by them on the Internet) that documents their system, and it is very good. My job at the last company I worked for was to write wizards for the Eclipse platform that would automate several of the most common tasks that a Subversion user would try to do, and that book was the only reference I needed. You can find the book on their site here: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ . They even do nightly builds of the book, so not only is their documentation complete and useful, it is also incredibly thorough and up to date.
If anyone on here hasn't read it, DO IT, because the first half will teach you why you want Subversion rather than CVS or some other alternative, and how to use it and how to get the most out of it (second half is lower level stuff you may not care about). It even includes best practices. Once you really learn how to use Subversion, you won't want to use anything else. And this is the way to get started.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.