Subversion: Is the jump from CVS worth it?

Posted Mar 18, 2004 12:25 UTC (Thu) by cloose (subscriber, #5066) [Link]

The article already mentioned that there a lot of CVS users out there and they don't have to/don't want to learn a lot to use Subversion. They don't have to completly change their working style or way of thinking to use it. There is a clear migration path and that's the big plus.

Christian

Posted Mar 18, 2004 18:30 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

• Windows support. My company's main product is Unix/Linux based, but we do have Windows tools, and some of them share code/libraries with the Unix stuff. Even if they didn't, I can't afford the time/effort to deal with two tools.
• Familiarity. The transistion from CVS to Subversion is straightforward. The transistion to Arch is a bigger mental hurdle.
• For a company with a few products and a very small developer base, a centralized system can be an advantage: one thing to back up, not too many worries about significant work be kept on a local disk. Contrariwise, the advantages of a distributed system are less meaningful in this environment.
• [snide]The Subversion people know what their project/product is called.[/snide] The arch/larch/tla/whatever thing is rather offputting, at first glance it seems like several competing and/or obsolete lines of development. I can't afford to change our VC system every few weeks, and for a long time arch seemed a risky commitment. It appears to be a lot more coherent now, but It Would Be Nice if the toplevel of wiki.gnuarch.org had a clarification of what all the different names represent in a prominent position. (Yes, this is obviously a minor point. But you're kidding yourself if you think someone who doesn't follow arch development is going to find this sort of thing a negative when they're trying to figure out what to replace CVS with.)

Posted Mar 18, 2004 21:24 UTC (Thu) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

Posted Mar 19, 2004 15:36 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

The focus of arch (and of darcs, monotone, etc) is to manage changesets, i.e., independent developments tiers by contributors.

Subversion is more mature (portability, file name issues (spaces!)). Arch has a very interesting architecture. Both have security issues, addressed by darcs and others (in particular, OpenCM).

Depending on your need, there are many factors to look at when choosing a code control system. Google around and learn about the joys of code management - this is still a wide and open field!

Cheers, Joachim