AlanBarber.Org
Monday, May 23, 2005
Subversion 1.2.0 released
The newest version of Subversion has been released today. Subversion is a source code version control tool. It’s similar to tools like the de facto standard open source CVS or Microsoft’s Visual Source Safe. These tools are used to allow developers to manage changes to source code. The major feature of any version control tool is the ability to allow a user to track every change made to a file in order to look back over the history of the file. Should bugs or other issues crop up it allows a developer to compare the versions of code in order to find out exactly where the bug occurred.
Subversion has been around since early 2000 and was developed as a replacement for CVS which has some very significant shortcomings.
The major difference between CVS and Subversion is that Subversion does directory versioning where as CVS does file versioning. This means that Subversion allows you to move, rename, delete, add, etc files and directories in a project over time and it properly tracks all that. Why is this important? Many times as you develop you might end up wanting to rearrange files into new directories or change their name. CVS isn’t smart enough to track that. If you rename a file or directory then CVS only sees a new file or directory and doesn’t know how to keep the history of the file, including the change tracked. You could say the CVS only sees the trees where as Subversion sees the forest.
Anyhoo, version 1.2.0 has been released. Here’s the new stuff:
Optional locking ("reserved checkouts")
Full WebDAV autoversioning
FSFS repository back end is now the default
Faster access to old revisions
Many improved APIs
Many bugfixes
I’m currently using version 1.1.4 for my projects. I think I’ll probably wait a week or so before I upgrade. I just like to give it time for other more daring people to take the plunge and weed out any problems. I’m sure it’s safe and stable by I prefer to know that from others using it instead of having my repositories get lost because of some horrible bug.
Check out subversion though. It’s a very nice tool and much more modern than stagnant old CVS.
on 05/23/2005 at 06:57 PM