KDE Switches to Subversion 310
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.)
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Mindhive question (Score:2)
I truly wished they have given a different name. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:2)
Sorry about yours, by the way.
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:2)
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:2)
But, this is the first I am reading of this. Why are they moving from CVS to Subversion? It would seem that if it lacks useful features available in CVS that KDE would stick with CVS.
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:3, Informative)
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. Phas
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:2)
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:2)
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.
Platinum support contract (Score:2, Funny)
Then you should certainly consider the $200,000/yr support contract. Then the on-site tech is an experienced fluffer [urbandictionary.com]. 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.
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:2)
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:2)
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:3, Funny)
Wow, your managers actually listen to anything your say? Crazy. My manager wouldn't pay attention long enough to actually object.
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:3, Insightful)
You think that's hard...try and get sign off on something called Double Choco Latte! [sourceforge.net]
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. [sourceforge.net] Nobody laughed, though we weren't
Re:I truly wished they have given a different name (Score:2, Informative)
A much needed switch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A much needed switch (Score:2, Informative)
That and some people use Novell netdrive to access subversion like a regular drive which results in tons of small uncommented commits if they have write permission.
Re:A much needed switch (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A much needed switch (Score:3, Informative)
Subversion Service: The research, analysis, and support gear-up needed to implement a Subversion service at SourceForge.net is now in progress. As with all SourceForge.net services, extensive analysis and testing must be performed to verify s
Re:A much needed switch (Score:3, Informative)
CVS's limitations and decided that it would be more painful to fix CVS than
it would be to start from scratch.
But don't worry about CVS, it'll be around for a long time to come.
Re:A much needed switch (Score:2)
It's the being around for a long time that I worry about.
Re:A much needed switch (Score:2)
Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:5, Informative)
We're using SubVersion for over two years now, versioning our in-house Linux distribution with which we're doing our products and we've never had any data loss (though we had some trouble with BDB back in the 0.xx days).
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Are you deliberately using acronyms, or is this really what you say.. :)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
I Say There Raymond The Lawyers Asses gives Really Oilly Injections over Really Salty Internships, You Might Marry Vogons, Head To Head
Wow that makes total sense! I see the light.
Uhhh... (Score:2, Informative)
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 [rsnapshot.org]. 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 di
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Regarding BDB, yes, I'm scared shitless. My company tried to use it to back an object database system. We had locking problems that forced us to write our own disk-based btrees (specific to our needs).
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:5, Informative)
If you're really super ultra paranoid, you could set up your own svn repository with your favorite backend, sync it up with KDE's project, and work from there, but then you're just making trouble for yourself.
SVN in client mode uses
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
So even if you could somehow connect to a corrupt BDB in such a way that the transaction could even start (instead of just returning an error before any files could be read at all), and you could download 99% of the changes before hitting a corruption, you'd STILL
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you work on an svn-based project like KDE which is already run by somebody else, you will most likely be stuck with their choice of backend, more often than not you'll get all the hazards (and efficiency) of a Berkeley backend.
But in this case you don't have to worry as it's not your problem any more ;-) And you're not the one to implement the backup (which everyone with a little common sense does). As a user you can't notice the backend differences anyways (except for a small corner-case: the speed o
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2, Informative)
Actually for any large svn project, the users will notice a significant speed difference between a svn server that uses the efficient binary-formatted BDB backend compared to one that uses the ASCII-formatted FSFS.
FSFS is not "ASCII-formatted". And I didn't notice any difference when I switched our 3GB repository from BDB to FSFS half a years ago :-)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2, Funny)
KFG
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously, if you don't use the feature, it's pretty useless, but, hey, how often has it been pointed out that every serious project that uses computers needs a good backup strategy?
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
The reason cvs fanboys love having textfiles around is that, well, you really need them in the not so unlikely case that cvs messes up. One of the many things that svn fixes is atomic commits. In svn a commit either fully succeeds or fails. In cvs on the other hand it may actually fail halfway and leave the reposit
Re:Why not everyone likes svn: (Score:2)
Differences (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Differences (Score:4, Informative)
There are lots more differences though, but the two I mentionend certainly sound like they made life a little easier.
Re:Differences (Score:5, Informative)
Subversion's really intended to be as close to a drop-in replacement for CVS as possible - except with most of the huge design flaws fixed.
The feature I most notice (I use Subversion at work, albeit with a fairly small dev team) is the ability to do handle file renames properly (preserving history). Atomic commits (of groups of files) are also nice.
There are lots of other important features [tigris.org] of course, but I tend to use it just as a better CVS - which role it fills admirably.
Re:Differences (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Differences (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Differences (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Differences (Score:2)
Re:Differences (Score:2)
Re:Differences (Score:5, Informative)
The main one tends to be lack of tracking of file/directory renames. CVS does not really handle this at all while Subversion handles this very well.
Subversion also treats a commit of changes to multiple files as an atomic operation. This is a major benefit. You can easily see what all went into a specific commit (bug fix/etc) without trying to track down each file that it happened to. You also never have to worry about part of your commit being on the server and part of it not. It either is committed or it is not. CVS can not do that. (Well, beyond a single file that is)
Another major issue is the client/server relationship. Subversion has a very clean client/server interface. It is orthogonal, well designed, and relatively low overhead. CVS can not claim this to be the case. In fact, CVS's client/server features were bolted on after-the-fact and show it.
Subversion can work via HTTP/HTTPS protocols via an Apache plugin. In fact, it is not just HTTP but WebDAV and DeltaV protocol based, which means that there are other tools that can play with the repository as a auto-revisioned filesystem.
Subversion makes it possible to do some advanced web interfaces rather easily, such as the Insurrection http://insurrection.tigris.org/ [tigris.org] does.
For me, once Subversion 1.1 came out there was no reason to look back at CVS other than legacy systems. (Subversion 1.0 was already better but it was 1.1 that finally put be over the edge.)
Re:Differences (Score:5, Informative)
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
There are two things that you'll find different when comming from CVS:
SubVersion as a whole has more clean, thought-out-design feel, IMHO. Being a former CVS user myself I guarantee you that after working with SubVersion for a while CVS feels a bit hacked together.
More switching! More, more! (Score:5, Interesting)
Great!
Now when are they going to be switching from [kde.org] Bugzilla [bugzilla.org] to Trac [edgewall.com]?
(insert ha-ha-only-serious-cos-Bugzilla-scares-me smiley here)
Re:More switching! More, more! (Score:3, Informative)
Why does bugzilla scare you?
Because it's ugly and not very user friendly... if you've seen commercial bug trackers or stuff like Trac you'll notice the difference. Don't get me wrong, Bugzilla is a valuable tool and it does the job it needs to do, but the UI is horrible.
Re:More switching! More, more! (Score:4, Interesting)
Purely because I feel the UI is complicated. Of course I've mainly dealt with it on hideously large and complex projects like KDE and Mozilla, so the complexity of the UI may simply be a function of the project's complexity (or, more specifically, a function of Mozilla's complexity, as it was originally designed for Mozilla).
Note that I'm not meaning to slag off Bugzilla at all - it does the job and does it well, as far as I understand. But I wouldn't want to use it for the kind of software I work on (much much smaller and simpler than Moz).
My team is using a combination of Trac and Mantis [mantisbt.org] at the moment - my boss likes Mantis better as a pure bugtracker, but I'm hoping to convert him after Trac 0.9. :)
Subversion + trac (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Subversion + trac (Score:4, Informative)
Scarab [tigris.org], the open-source bug tracking tool that CollabNet's commercial offering [collab.net] uses and GForge [gforge.org], although cumbersome to setup are IMHO better alternatives if you're looking for bug-tracking tools to use along with SubVersion
--
Ravi
Re:Subversion + trac (Score:2)
Re:Subversion + trac (Score:2)
Re:Subversion + trac (Score:4, Informative)
I understand that Trac support for multiple projects (along with a few other features) is due soon - I believe as part of the upcoming 0.9 release [edgewall.com].
Thanks for the pointers re: Scarab and GForge though, I'll have a look at them. Always nice to keep up-to-date with the alternatives. :)
Re:Subversion + trac (Score:2)
My worst bug with scarab was that it started its 'index' numbers over again. So I had multiple bugs with the same bug number.
Re:Subversion + trac (Score:2)
Eh, it happens, don't worry about it :).
Good to see another Trac [edgewall.com] fan helping spread the word. Damn I love that software.
Quite seriously, it would be interesting to see a really major opensource project like KDE switch to Trac - though using Subversion is a necessary first step, so we'll have to wait and see if a few more old-school opensource projects (eg. GCC, OpenOffice, Mozilla, perhaps one of the BSDs) start making the transition from CVS to Subversion.
Re:Subversion + trac (Score:2)
Do you have any reliable information on this, or are you just guessing?
I'd think it very unlikely that any large project (GNU-ish or otherwise) currently based on CVS could convert to GNU Arch - it's just too different on too many levels. Whereas Subversion is under a perfectly acceptable free software license (even if it's not the GPL and it's not spiritually Free software) and it is a reasonable technical upgrade from CVS, while GNU Arch just isn't.
successor to CVS (Score:5, Informative)
GUI frontend for SVN (Score:2)
Right now I've been using the CLI and I was wondering if anybody knew of GUI frontends (especially for diff'ing).
Re:GUI frontend for SVN (Score:5, Informative)
There's also a Subversion plugin for Eclipse, in case you're using that.
Re:GUI frontend for SVN (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:GUI frontend for SVN (Score:3, Informative)
This is what happens... (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, Microsoft is coming out with their own alternative. It's called Coercion.
- Greg
I would love to see how well Insurrection works... (Score:5, Informative)
You can play around with it at http://www.sinz.org/Michael.Sinz/Insurrection/ [sinz.org]
Note that I am still in somewhat active development but the code is also in active use. It can be checked out with:
TortoiseSVN (Score:5, Informative)
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ [tigris.org]
merging (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:merging (Score:2, Informative)
FYI, I use Subversion but merging in Subversion and CVS is not nearly as simple as with Perforce or Arch. I subscribe to the subversion dev mailing list and I think it's probably at least another 1-2 years before Subversion has merging capabiliies on par with Perforce, Arch,
If you're interested in doing lots of merging with Subversion then you'll want to look at svnmerge ( http://www.dellroad.org/svnmerge/index [dellroad.org]). I haven't used it but it ge
Try SVK (Score:2, Informative)
Reasons NOT to do it in an Eclipse environment (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Reasons NOT to do it in an Eclipse environment (Score:2)
*sigh* (Score:2)
Subversion is kinda behind the curve these days. I mean the whole concept of Subversion can basically be summed up as "let's make something that feels just like CVS, but doesn't suck." There are lots of free alternatives that provide much more advanced capabilities.
It's too bad they didn't chose something more advanced like Vesta [vestasys.org], or Codeville [codeville.org], or monotone [venge.net], or Darcs [darcs.net].
Apache switched to Subversion (Score:2)
When is SourceForge making this move?
KDE is not the biggest one (Score:2)
But nevertheless, Konkratulations
Re:KDE is not the biggest one (Score:2)
with jakarta alone having more than 30 subprojects many of them in the realm of several million lines of code... so go figure it out yourself.
but besides that, those two big installations clearly show, that subversion really is ready for serious use. All I wished for would be a decent KDE and OSX frontend to SVN, the best would be to have svn integrated into konqueror and getting versioning on vfs level t
Re:windows cvs (Score:2, Informative)
Re:windows cvs (Score:2, Informative)
Re:windows cvs (Score:5, Informative)
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 [apache.org].
Maybe you should read HOWTO Setup A Server on Windows [subversionary.org].
-MallocRe:windows cvs (Score:2)
You could even try reading the fine Subversion red manual. [red-bean.com] Note that, for a simple setup using the file based repository (FSFS), you don't need any fancy-dan Apache or BDB, just subversion itself.
Re:Oh no! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh no! (Score:2)
Re:Oh no! (Score:2)
Re:Oh no! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:No per file version numbers. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Is KDE using BDB or FSFS? (Score:3, Informative)