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Subversion 1.5.0 Released
Hyrum writes "The Subversion team is proud to announce the release of Subversion 1.5.0, a popular open source version control system. The first new feature release of Subversion in almost 2 years, 1.5.0 contains a number of new improvements and features. A detailed list of changes can be found in the release notes. Among the major new features included in this release is merge tracking—Subversion now keeps track of what changes have been merged where. Source code is available immediately, with various other packages available soon."
or does anyone else find the FISA article and the Subversion article being sequential a tad ironic?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Those flames are subversive to normal communication, not to mention monotonous. But now that you mentioned them, somebody will have to start one. What a git.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Part of the problem is that the conversion scripts coming from CVS have to make up some data that isn't in the repository, but which all newer SCMs track.
,v files had gotten truncated somewhere way back; because that only impacted attempts to retrieve revisions prior to the truncation point, nobody noticed until their backups had already been fully rotated past that point. More modern SCMs have provisions in their data formats for validating repository validity, and even for checking changesets against deliberate tampering.
If you get yourself to something modern enough to support multi-file transactions, to recognize rename operations, to store merge history, and to manage branches in a reliable way (creating a file on a branch in CVS can also create that file in HEAD... or at least, it did last time I used CVS in production) future conversions won't be as necessarily painful and/or lossy.
CVS isn't even reliable in terms of storing history in such a way that you can guarantee that you haven't lost something; when I was maintainer of cscvs, I had several users having problems because their
If you're legitimately concerned about your data, you'll get off of CVS at the first opportunity.
I'm more into sedition than subversion.
Wait. What?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
What a bazaar reply. Are you suffering from mercurial poisoning?
Probably. I'll head down to CVS before it gets too darcs and see if I can pick up something. Oh, and a quilt to keep the patient warm.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
CVS was good enough for my company until we learned how SVN was able to make many things much easier. We did fresh imports of all of our projects into SVN. So we lost history in the new repository but kept around the old CVS repository just in case we needed its history.
That was a few years ago and we're far more productive today, especially with branching and merging.
Developers: We can use your help.
You guys are really trying to be funny by perforce.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've been using subversion since it first came out and I must say it is really easy to use and a dream compared to some of the commercial offerings I have to fight with.
Thanks for all the hard work...
I'm in the process of migrating my department from Subversion to Git for a single very compelling reason. Distributed Development.
I work in the Maritime Industry and frequently have to change software on the fly during Sea Trials. With SVN, revision control while on a boat is impossible since while offline, there is no access to the central repository to check in revisions. Now with Git, I can continue to work productively offline and seamlessly push the day's changes and revision history to a repository on the network drive for nightly backup when returning to the office.
I realize not everyone has the requirements I do for source control, but everyone should pick the SCM Tool which best meets their organization's or personal requirements. Having a working familiarity with several tools is necessary to make an informed decision.
My guess is that SVN will turn out to be too little, too late with its merge tracking support. It'll be a boost for folks already using SVN who don't want to switch toolchains, but it's pretty easy to move from SVN to the new tools (beyond export, several newer SCMs have two-way commit support with SVN).
Generationally speaking, it feels like SVN is still trying to catch up to Perforce... but that ship has sailed. The teams working on the new round of decentralized SCMs[*] have done deep rethinking of source control problems and challenges, and the results are generally brilliant. These problems aren't esoteric -- administration and day-to-day usage really is easier with the new stuff. After a while using git, Bazaar, etc., the crufty old SCM tools seem like doing image editing in a hex editor instead of a GUI app.
[*] Includes: Bazaar, Darcs, git, and Mercurial (hg)
There's also Mercurial, which maintains a command syntax similar to Subversion, but uses distributed repositories. With it one can easily create a local repository suitable for offline use, including access to the full project history.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
You don't have to do a nightly svn cp branches/devel branches/`date +%Y-%m-%d` to track all your revisions locally.
Seriously though, each working copy is a fully functional repository with complete history able to merge changes from other working copies (which are also fully functional repositories etc.)
It also doesn't need a full server infrastructure. I've started using local, stand alone, git repositories to track config files.
Stupid flounders!
This had better stop before we end up Arch enemies.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
I note the preliminary merge support with interest, because we use svn at work (and I'm encouraging conversion to git) and having svn's metadata showing merging some of our branches will help with the conversion to git.
I agree with you that this is too little, too late. That said, there's one respect where Git is well behind: Usability.
svn and bzr both have it beat -- hard -- in that respect; particularly svn, which has more pervasive tool support (but plenty of other disadvantages). That does little good, though, when you're picking a tool for use on a large project including artists, tech writers, win32 GUI developers, and other folks who have less of the appropriate inclinations.
I say this as someone using git on a daily basis. It's not a bad tool, but an end-all be-all it's not; for my own projects, I use bazaar.
No.
I started out in version control with SCCS. I used the first generation of ClearCase when it came out. (Still the most transparent system yet devised, a dream to use for an individual developer, crippled by inability to scale, admin complexity, and absurd cost).
The fact of the matter is that CVS works. My current project has > 500K lines of code in CVS, and we sell product. We don't like CVS, we're planning to move to SVN, but the fact of the matter is that we don't *have* to. To me, the source control system is more or less like the file system : I need it to the extent that my work is in there, but other than that I don't want to see it or even know it's there. People drool over git and mercurial like these things are -doing work-. I don't get it and I don't buy it. The fact of the matter is, that unlike say a compiler, the SCM system has ZERO effect on the end product.
So I get the advantages -for some projects-, esp. large open source or distributed commercial projects, of a natively distributed SCM system. I don't get how SVN is now inferior and lame because it isn't distributed.
This is a clearcase of a thread going out of control.
Right, because remembering a bunch of svn:properties is so easy. Figuring out why subversion memory faults when given both a file and url path is so user friendly. Or why you can't use a subversion folder through a symbolic link. Or why there are .svn folder everywhere, or if they are hidden why you can't remove an empty folder. etc. svn is a piece of junk and especially from usability pov.
In this release they made it so you can mark a subfolder so it doesn't update automatically. That's like two lines of code.... noup = get_property(curpath, "noupdate"); if (matches(noup, "nosubfolder")) return; That's the big progress they've made on the file layout which they've known for years is retarded ?!
In mercurial or git people submit patches for this kind of thing all the time, because it's in python or scripts and easy to change. Svn is over-engineered and so inflexible that it is being left behind.
I'm not talking about usability by power users; I'm talking about usability by idiots. Think Windows, not vi; both of those are very usable, but by two different groups of people. Compared to git, svn has a comparatively simple set of concepts which need to be grasped by its userbase. Yes, the WC library is horrid, and has all kinds of nasty gotchas that hit command line users -- particularly around renames, but your average idiot is coming from CVS (if anything at all) and doesn't expect renames to work anyhow.
I agree that svn is a POS. I've always thought that, and if you look back a bit in my posting history you'll see it confirmed; however, in a commercial environment it's often an easier sell than git.
...TortoiseSVN (yes, I know it's not technically part of svn). Makes version-control accessible to pretty much anyone who can operate a mouse.
I'd love to move to git or mercurial or similar, but frankly Tortoise outweighs all that distributed goodness.
But is anyone keeping the source safe?
You're painting this far too black and white.
Distributed systems have their own set of limitations, some of which centralized tools don't have. Some development processes cannot be implemented with distributed tools, pretty much the same way as processes such as how the Linux kernel is developed cannot be implemented by centralized tools.
For example:
Let's say I wanted to make sure that any change going into my project enters the main line, or "trunk", first, and is then applied to release branches if necessary. This makes sure that I have one common place to log all changes ever entering my code base. That's very simple requirement, right? This approach is used by many projects, e.g. by all the BSDs, and by Subversion itself. Let's say I picked Mercurial as my tool for the job.
So I have a changeset on my trunk, and I want to merge it into my 1.x and my 2.x release branches. I will first need to pull the change from trunk into my branch, right?
Wait... why does it say "up to which"? I just want that one change!
Darn, turns out that in Mercurial, changesets depend on all their ancestors in order to guarantee integrity of all changes I pull from another clone of my repo. You cannot pull a change without having around its parent, since revisions are identified by hashes in order to be globally unique across all clones. The hash of a revision is derived partly from the hashes of its parent revisions (they are included in the manifest).
So I need all parent revisions of my changeset in my branch. Since I've forked off my branch from trunk, and have not yet made changes to the branch itself (remember that all changes to the branch should be coming in via trunk), Mercurial will see no conflicting heads and simply forward my release branch to the latest head of trunk. So I can either pull every change I've made on trunk since forking the release branch (not much point in that), or manually apply a patch to the release branch (i.e. side-step the tool).
Well, great. With Subversion 1.5, all you need to do to get a changeset, say rev 42, from trunk to a release branch is
So in practice, people using Mercurial end up fixing problems on their release branches, and merge the fixes to their main line later. And yes, it seems like you have to manually apply a fix to all your release branches separately (at least I haven't yet found another way).
In all fairness, there is in fact an extension that allows Mercurial to "transplant" a changeset from one branch to another without requiring you to also merge all the parents of the changeset: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/TransplantExtension
This extension maintains a special file mapping local changeset hashes to remote ones. You have to bet your luck on not ever creating the same hash for two different revisions, though, otherwise your project's history is borked (I have no idea how likely this is).
Certainly, maintaining a separate list of changeset ids is not something intended in the original design, which focused on providing distributed branching and merging. The design does a very good job at this no doubt. By making sure that all bran
``I mean, OpenBSD has stated in the past that CVS works well enough for them, and the risk of converting the repository is not worth it''
It may be good enough for them, but it's not good enough for me. I don't want to spend half a day upgrading my ports collection through CVS if it's quicker for me to just download the new tarball.
``I never got the (recent?) craze over using the latest SCM of the week''
I think it is recent mainly because Subversion has broken the hegemony of CVS. Of course there is much inertia to switch, and that is a Good Thing. Subversion, however, is easy to pick up and so much better that it actually displaced CVS as the Version Control System Everyone Uses (TM). Inspired by the success of Subversion, everyone with the inclination and a large enough ego started their own "better than CVS" version control system. Some of them are horrible, some of them are shiny commercial crap, some of them are better in theory, but lacking in implementation, and some are actually better. My personal favorite is Git. It works well, is easy to pick up if you already know CVS or Subversion, has a couple of desireable features, and, last but not least, it's FAST. Of course, many people will stick with Subversion, CVS, or whatever Microsoft integrates with their other software.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'll add to your post a point that is often missed, so it bears repeating:
Just because git _allows_ you to do distributed development (multiple repositories) doesn't mean you _can't_ have a single main repository. There can still be one "blessed" version of the code, which is backed up and everything else you like to do with your Subversion repository.
However, if you ever want to make a couple of commits while disconnected from the network, or try something out, making multiple commits along the way, until you can make an informed decision about pushing your changes to the main branch or not - with git, you can. So, even if you don't need those capabilities now, choosing git may still be a good idea.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I avoided calling it a Central Repository in all the training materials I prepared for my coworkers, instead I called it the Authorative Repository. Only a small subset of us have write access to it, so no one can push any branches to it. Instead, approved changes must be pulled to it by myself or the other maintainer, but everyone can read from it if they want to create a remote tracking branch or pull from it. Push was only implemented to allow those familiar with a central repository paradigm to keep the same workflow, it's not a necessary function to work with Git.
The authorative repository is the only one releases will be made from, though since everyone's working repositories are on network drives they are all backed up nightly. Then if they are working offline, they just clone their personal working repository to a local drive. I really like that I can pick and choose which repositories to merge based on the fix or feature, and have the developer working on those branches be able to pull from the authorative repository in the mean time to keep the branch from diverging too far. Maybe something similar can be done with SVN, but I really like how the Git paradigm fits, and even encourages, that workflow.
Wow! I just looked at Bazaar.
Things I noticed:
Bazaar developers are very good writers. They explain things very well.
A lot of things they say make good sense to me. (Bazaar versus Git)