Slashdot Log In
Subversion 1.0 Released
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Feb 22, 2004 10:36 PM
from the milestone dept.
from the milestone dept.
Phil John writes "Subversion 1.0 has finally been released. The people who maintain CVS have given us a viable replacement for our de-facto (and aged) versioning system. If you're new to Subversion its feature list looks like fixes for everything that is wrong in CVS, renaming, directory structure and metadata version tracking, file deletion, proper management of binary files and it's pretty portable to boot." According to the download page, binaries may take a few days to appear.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
What's with that? (Score:5, Funny)
What's so good about a version control system that takes days for binaries to appear? That's a pretty big bug to work out. (fp)
Bah, a few days... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:What's with that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What's with that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Will I need MSVC? (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem here is that many open source projects for Microsoft Windows will compile only on Microsoft Visual Studio, which costs over 1,000 USD for one seat. Will the Windows version of Subversion compile cleanly on MinGW+MSYS? Or will I have to try to compile the UNIX version on Cygwin? I'd go look myself, but the site seems to be slashdotted, and even the Google Cache runs extremely slowly because Mozilla won't render anything until it has failed to fetch the CSS from the slashdotted site.
Parent
Re:Will I need MSVC? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Where can I buy LinuxBIOS PCs? (Score:5, Interesting)
it always worries my when open source software relies on closed-sources or standards.
Very little demand seems to exist for completely open-source PCs. I haven't seen many computer manufacturers ship their machines with LinuxBIOS or any other Free firmware. Therefore, on most computers, LILO and GRUB (the most common Linux bootloaders) rely on a proprietary BIOS. Even if you exclude BIOS from consideration, most Free programs running on a proprietary operating system rely on the proprietary system's runtime library (e.g. msvcrt.dll, Sun libc, etc).
Parent
Re:CVS and others (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, it serves two functions. First, it tracks changes made to files in your source tree, so that if the latest tracked version of a particular piece of code is broken, you can compare it to or even roll back to an older version of the code to either work around or diagnose what broke. Second, it allows multiple users to work on the same file at the same time without stepping on each others toes too much. This works by having each user check out a copy of the code from the main repository which contains the "master" copies of the code. When they're done working on the code they can check it back in to the repository where (often with a little human intervention) the changes are merged with the most recent copy stashed in the repository.
Part of that does involve a central server to store repository in -- on a local network this is could often be a commonly accessable directory or mounted drive off of a WinServer/SMB or NFS server. CVS also allows for internet checkouts and checkins, which is how a lot of open source stuff is handled.
CVS and other version control programs have lots of other features I haven't mentioned here, such as branches, labels, etc., but I figured this gives you a good idea of what's going on.
Hope this helps.
Parent
Re:CVS and others (Score:5, Informative)
First, it tracks changes made to files in your source tree [...]
While CVS tracks changes made to individual _files_ in the source tree, some other revision control systems (ie. Arch, BitKeeper, etc) store changes to the tree state atomically. That is to say, if you have file1.c and file1.h and you make a change that touches both of them, you can bundle both those changes together into one atomic operation, so that they show up as just one changelog entry and that every developer who applies one of these changes always gets both of them.
In CVS, to know that file1.c version 1.13 and file1.h version 1.2 both belong in the same tree, you need to "tag" each file in the tree -- adding notation to the backend store for each individual file indicating that they both are tied to THIS_TAG_VERSION. In the case of a changeset-oriented system, on the other hand, the appropriate version of both files is just another element of the repository state -- so instead of a set of individual file states, you just have one big repository state that holds everything together.
This also makes updates very fast, since instead of checking for each file "is there an updated version of this file?" for each and every file in the repository, you can just check "are there new patches for this repository?" and download that.
There are other things one can reasonably expect of a modern revision control system, as well. For instance, a site using tla-pqm to manage their Arch repository can be set up such that only code which compiles and passes the unit tests can be merged into the primary repository; this is exceedingly good practice, especially on big teams.
Another nifty thing good revision control systems can do (well, some of them -- Subversion, for instance, lacks this) is distributed operation. For instance, this means you can make a branch of someone else's code stored on your own server, make revision-controlled changes on that server, and then ask them to merge your changes back into their branch -- without yourself having any access to their server at all! Distributed branching, in combination with good branch and merge operators, enable quite a lot of workflows that would otherwise be quite impractical. In terms of release-quality revision control systems, the only two that really have this support are Arch and BitKeeper (svk and darcs do something similar, but neither is exactly mature or in posession of a substantial userbase; that said, I think darcs is quite interesting from a research-project point of view).
By the way, I'm currently the maintainer of cscvs (a tool for building a SQLite database with inferred changeset information from analyzing a CVS repository's history, and then doing interesting things in it -- ranging from reporting to importing the archive into Arch), making me an interesting combination of "informed" and "biased" in this discussion. If you're interested in revision control and possibly interested in a continuation of this rant (or disagree with some part of it), please drop me an email.
Parent
sf.net (Score:5, Interesting)
Works well (Score:5, Informative)
My congrats to the dev team for a good solid product.
For those looking to use it, befor eyou do, work out your versioned directory structure, it *is* kinda important (although not critical, you can move things around afterwards). For example, I have:
trunk/(project name)
tag/(project name)/(tag)
branch/(project name)/(branch name)
as my general layout. Other people may have other recommendations, but tags and branches etc are no longer this explicit thing, its just about where you put them in the "filesystem".
Filesystem driver? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some time ago I worked with Rational ClearCase and the filesystem integration was really nice.
10 revision control system comparison (Score:5, Informative)
http://better-scm.berlios.de/comparison/compariso
Re:10 revision control system comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)
Their objections (other than performance, which has been dramatically improved lately) have been largely silly things, not related to the Arch core itself (which is most excellently designed; thanks Tom!), but rather mostly UI-type issues ("we want built-in a graphical 3-way merge tool!" type items).
That's the case for Arch, anyhow. As for the post you just mentioned, its objections to SVN happen to be things that either don't hinder Arch at all or should be non-issues altogether (ie. better solution available):
1. Equivalent to cvsup. Arch has this functionality built in, implicit in its mirroring and distributed support features.
2. Support for (user-supplied) keywords. The general consensus on the Arch list is that it's a bad idea for any revision control system to support this "feature" at all, and that there are better ways to do anything one could want them for.
3. Converting the repository -- cscvs, a tool I help to maintain, does just that.
Parent
Why Subversion Kicks Ass (Score:5, Informative)
Subversion is, in essence, a reimplementation of CVS without the limitations of CVS.
It has basically the same functionality as CVS, but is based on a BerkeleyDB backend instead of a simple filesystem approach like CVS. This means, among many other things, that you can move files from directory to directory and rename them without orphaning them.
This is, IMHO, reason enough to switch. (And was reason enough to switch for me a while ago.)
SVN can do binary-file diffs, tracks submissions of multiple files as part of the same revision, and if memory serves me correctly, does O(1) branching and tagging.
For those of you who, like me, use TortoiseCVS to do version control in windows, there is TortoiseSVN which works like a charm and provides all the functionality you're using in TortoiseCVS with some nice extras.
I could go on at great length, but the Subversion team can probably do a much better job explaining this than I can, so go to their web site instead.
Quite honestly, I think that Subversion is so much superior to CVS that it will completely replace it, and I haven't got anything to do with the project. Once I switched over, I never looked back.
1.0 release means that SVN now supports everything that CVS does, with a few extras. From here, they are planning to work on new features.
I've heard some bellyaching over the license already (boo hoo). BSD code is Gratis and Libre, and if the Subversion team isn't losing sleep over MicroSomeone ha>oring their project into one of their own, I won't either.
Please don't turn this discussion into another license vs. license argument, and have a look at the project for its real merit.
more information (Score:5, Informative)
Version Control with Subversion
Draft Revision 8770
Ben Collins-Sussman
Brian W. Fitzpatrick
C. Michael Pilato
-jim
Now will SourceForge adopt it? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you need a nice subversion client on windows... (Score:5, Informative)
Also has a visual diff and all sorts of other goodies in it too. There's also a (somewhat unrelated) project of the same ilk for CVS called, unsurprisingly, TortoiseCVS (different developers IIRC, same idea though, hence the similar name).
I've been using Subversion for the last 6 months and TortoiseSVN for the last 5, never had any data corruption or borked repositories, it Just Works(tm).
What I like is that the developers started eating their own dogfood fairly early on and have been self hosting for a fair while now, so that shows you how much faith they have in the system.
slashdot a bit over-eager (Score:5, Informative)
I think slashdot may have jumped the gun here, and I hope that the slashdotting of their web server is not going to cause them problems with actually getting 1.0 out the door, which is supposed to happen sometime Monday (timezone unknown).
FAQ (Score:5, Informative)
2. Want decentralized subversion? Check out the svk project at http://svk.elixus.org/
3. Best benefits over CVS? Well, its basically a 4-year redesign/rewrite/replacement of cvs by people very familiar with cvs (ie wrote the book on cvs and runs a company specializing in cvs services).
a. Cheap copies (constant time, store diffs only so branch often if you want even on very large projects).
b. Directories and metadata are versioned too.
c. You can move files and directories without losing history.
d. Atomic commits! Issue a bunch of "add" commands, then a "commit". The whole thing rolls back if any of it fails and the revision is per commit (not file).
e. Other benefits may be more important to you than these (but these were enough for me to switch from cvs to svn).
4. Is svn 1.0 ready for prime-time? Subversion project has been hosting itself for almost 2 years now and they never lost any code. For the ultra-paranoid, you can configure it to keep all bsdb logs so you can roll back every transaction since the beginning of your repository creation (but that would be silly).
Don't forget to see:
http://www.red-bean.com/sussman/svn-anti-fu
And irc: #svn on freenode
astyle, indent, etc. with subversion (Score:5, Interesting)
And yes, I know that some of you think this is a terrible, horrible idea and that my keyboard should be confiscated for even suggesting it. But this ability is on my "holy grail" list for version control systems, and I won't rest till I find it!
Re:astyle, indent, etc. with subversion (Score:5, Informative)
You have 3 different places to hook into the commit cycle in version 1.0:
- startcommit
- pre-commit
- post-commit
start-commit is passed the repository and the user, pre-commit is passed the repository and the name of the transaction (which can be examined with svnlook), and post-commit is passed the repository and the revision number. If either start-commit or pre-commit fail, the commit is rolled back; post-commit exit status is ignored.Before the transaction begins, you can prequalify the user for commit privs
After the transaction tree has been completely built, but before it's actually committed to the repository
After the entire commit cycle is completed
This could be used to canonize it coming in... it would be up to the user to reformat it coming out if desired... but everything would then get flagged as locally modified... though the user could always recanonize the code before committing... which defeats your goal of automating it all:)
So, the grail is closer, but as always, just out of reach.
Parent
Re:astyle, indent, etc. with subversion (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone know if there is a way to use subversion for automatic canonization of code style?
Yeah, host a python [python.org] repository with it.
Parent
Major data corruption issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Last build we tried was a couple of months ago.
Try compiling it on different architectures (ours are i686-linux and hppa2.0-hpux11.00), mixing slight version differences, mixing which server you use (svn, http).
Then say hello to _constant_ intervention by someone who has admin privileges to recover your hosed repository.
I hate to say it, but now of course with 1.0 we'll try again. But I wouldn've thought they were a long way off based on our problems.
And this is with just 3 people using it on a test project? CVS has bugged me for years, but it can handle the basics without error.
I'm willing to admit that something we did could've caused all our problems (funny compiler flag or version, wrong switch enabled), but I can't afford the time spent trying to get a superior, but buggy, tool to just do the basics, even if the root cause is in some arcane step in the build process (which is truly hideous).
I wish them luck, but honestly I've never been able to figure out how all these happy subversion users ever got it to work.
There's still time though to pull the plug on our imminent order of Bitkeeper if by some miracle things have improved a lot very quickly.
Don't jump the gun, folks! (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks for all the nice comments. Stay tuned for the official announcement.
Re:Not bad, but... (Score:5, Informative)
It's released under an Apache Style [tigris.org] license.
Google Cache [216.239.39.104] since the site seems to be dying as we speak.
Parent
Re:Not bad, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Not bad, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Not bad, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
What a strange statement. Do you use XFree86? OpenSSH? There's any amount of such software out there under similar licences, and if the original BSD TCP/IP stack hadn't been under such a licence, it's doubtful the internet would be as interoperable as it is today, and if X hadn't been under the MIT licence, we'd be stuck with a bunch of incompatible proprietary windowing systems.
Parent
Re:Not bad, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Name a single counterexample of a GPL'd library shipped as part of a commercial OS.
Let's take two examples here: first, zlib. It was released under the BSD licence, not GPL, because it was important to wean people off the LZW-patent-encumbred compress. And it made it to commercial systems. But take, on the other hand, the readline library. This could have been immensely useful to a lot of commercial vendors, and Stallman knew it, so he used the GPL (not even LGPL) to try and "force" third party code to be GPL'd. As a result, nobody outside the free software world uses it.
Parent
Re:Comparing the software (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Comparing the software (Score:5, Funny)
You're right - ask for your money back.
Parent
Re:Comparing the software (Score:5, Informative)
Note: written by a subversion dev
Parent
SVN Anti-FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Also, #svn channel on freenode irc is helpful.
Parent
Re:Comparing the software (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Does Subversion require a UNIX account per user (Score:5, Informative)
Supported write protocols include webdav, sftp (the one that's part of ssh) and ftp. Shell access is never required.
Parent
Re:Mirror? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:It runs on top of Apache? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:It runs on top of Apache? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:with WebDAV as well (Score:5, Informative)
* It can run as an Apache module or a standalone server
* It can go anywhere HTTP goes (including caching proxies) as it runs entirely over port 80 with WebDAVish calls.
* It implements part of the WebDAV protocol, and in the future might fully implement it meaning seamless integration in to software like Macromedia Dreamweaver.
* Uses Apache for the authentication, so you can authenticate with any module you find/write.
Right now our WSU Linux User Group is using Subversion for development. Authentication is tied to a PostgreSQL backend that is shared with the Zope/Plone server, so an admin can login to the Member panel and add/remove people from the developer group to give or take Subversion access. A real WebDAV folder is also setup that shares the same authentication method. Now we just have to tie in mail server and ssh authing...
Parent
Re:with WebDAV as well (Score:5, Informative)
For example, there's also a supported custom network protocol server (svnserve, uses "svn://" URIs) for those that don't/can't maintain Apache w/mod_dav.
(And everything else people say about how cool Subversion is -- is true! Really, check it out. Sourceforge should switch over ASAP.)
Parent
Re:RCS can handle binary data since v5.7 (Score:5, Informative)
It's possible, through a variety of easily-made missteps, for a file to lose the tag that marks it as binary. Suddenly, fresh checkouts of the file have newline translations done on them, and all hell breaks loose. And, if you edit the ,v file that stores the revision history, you'll discover that the binary file is actually stored as a raw byte range within a text file.
So, yeah, RCS supports binary files. It just doesn't do it very well.
Schwab
Parent
Check on tigris.org (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:MOD DOWN - NEW TROLL ALERT (Score:5, Funny)
Many of these are folks who post plagarized articles and then point it out with another account to gain karma.
Do not mod up ACs who point out that people who point out people who post plagiarized articles.
Many of these are folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against
folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against
folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against
folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against
Oh, wheels-within-wheel-within -- oh just take the blue pill!
Parent
Re:GREAT! (Score:5, Informative)
More info on svk: http://svk.elixus.org/
The beauty of being designed from the ground up to be a set of C APIs allows it to be used in any way you want.
For me, I like using it with ViewCVS and TortoiseSVN (similar to the awesome TortoiseCVS extention to Windows Explorer).
Parent
Why not GNU Arch instead of Bitkeeper? (Score:5, Interesting)
Linus wants a distributed system, which Bitkeeper is.
Did Linus evaluate GNU Arch [gnu.org]? If so, what did he find wrong with it? One of the goals of Arch is to replace Bitkeeper. Yes, there exists one known feature that Arch lacks compared to BK [berlios.de], namely copying files within a repository while forking its change history, but why did Linus find this a showstopper? Or has Arch progressed rapidly since the BK decision?
Parent
Re:Symlinks under Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, NTFS supports both soft and hard links.
From a practical I-want-to-have-software-using-it standpoint, Windows doesn't have support for either, just shortcuts.
Parent
Re:Renaming yes, sharing no (Score:5, Informative)
Parent