blog.s11n.net

Okay, okay… subversion

Okay, i give in…

In an earlier post i complained that i wouldn’t move libs11n to the subversion source control system, mainly because the concept of repository root is fundamentally different in SVN and i really prefer CVS’s approach.

i’ve changed my mind. i mean, i still prefer CVS’s approach to a repository root, but overall Subversion is a better system.

The past couple weeks i have spent a lot of time creating my main web site, wanderinghorse.net. Part of that process was collecting several different “mini-projects”, mostly hosted on s11n.net, and moving them over to that site. That proved to be a perfect chance to try out Subversion.

After a few hours of playing with SVN, though, i was thoroughly convinced. The ability to easily move and delete directories is really great, and allows a lot of freedoms in the source tree which aren’t possible with CVS. Also, CVS is growing ever less appropriate for storing project documentation, as most of mine is in OpenDocument format. CVS cannot do binary diffs, so each time i commit the libs11n manual (currently 450k), the CVS tree grows appropriately. SVN handles this much more gracefully.

So, while i will miss some aspects of CVS, it would seem that SVN really is a step forward, as opposed to a step backwards.