Under Control

Jeremy and Matt both reminded me of Subversion ("SVN") in the same week, and I spent a few hours over the past couple days installing it on my two main Linux machines. I'm very pleased with it so far. I opted for the WebDAV server approach, so I've got Apache2 running for the first time. SVN feels much cleaner than CVS, and previously complex operations are now braindead-easy. (Tagging and branching, anyone?)

There are some things SVN does differently. (To use technobabble, there's a slight paradigm shift.) One of the strangest things coming from a CVS background is SVN's interpretation of revision numbers. Checkins increment the revision number of the entire repository, not just the changed files. I've been looking at some public repositories and many have revision numbers exceeding 1,000.

To extend this even further, updates to a branch increment the main trunk revison number. The branches and trunk are just subdirectories of the same repository, but that's a topic for another day.

I've started a wiki page for my new adventures in version control. I've got a couple cool ideas for future projects. I'll keep you posted, I know how interested you all are.