Subversion Better than CVS?
By Pete Freitag
I have been reading up on Subversion - an open source control product, my friend Tim provoked me into this. I recommend checking out the Subversion Book (svnbook.red-bean.com) (html, pdf) - which is a draft of an upcoming book Version Control With Subversion (O'Reilly & Associates). It gives a good introduction of source control concepts, as well as info on using Subversion. Subversion 1.0 was just released in Feb.
Subversion is similar to cvs, they are both: open source, use the copy-modify-merge version control model, and have similar command line syntax. One of my peeves with CVS was the hassle of dealing with binary files - subversion treats all files as binary, and does binary diffs. It also has better support for changing directory structure. And possibly one of the more interesting features, to me at least, is the way it runs on the server - you access the repository with url's (eg http://server/module, file://x/y/z, etc). Subversion has an Apache module that uses webdav for the server. This is nice because many of us web developers are already familiar with administering Apache, and you can leverage Apache for authentications, and encryption (https). From what I have seen so far subversion looks to be superior to CVS, at least for my needs. Have you used both?, thoughts?
Subversion Better than CVS? was first published on March 04, 2004.
If you like reading about subversion, version control, or cvs then you might also like:
- Cheat Sheet Roundup - Over 30 Cheatsheets for developers
- Bug Report hooks for FindBugs and Subversion
- Using Subversion Hooks to send out build emails
- Top 10 Things I like about subversion