As the title suggests, I finally got the chance to make use of Subversion. I’ve been a CVS guru for quite some time and I really think it has done a great job providing me with the things I need for work collaboration and source code management.
But last weekend, when I finally decided to make use of a source code management system for my pet projects, I took a glance at Subversion. Installing it was not really that hard and there’s a lot of documentation available when you Google around. So without looking at other options, I decided to install Subversion on my VPS.
As I’ve said, installing it was easy and there’s a lot of HOWTO’s out there so I won’t elaborate on that part with this post. I would rather express my first impression of Subversion rather than go into its technical details. Initially, it’s a bit confusing when you’re coming from CVS, since it has a different way of managing your source code tree and versions. Just look at its suggested directory structure:
/myproject/trunk
/myproject/branches
/myproject/tags
This means that under your project directory you have to create 3 subfolders named trunk, branches, and tags. Weird ei? CVS doesn’t really need such structure since it handles the directory structure of your project. I’m still not aware of the real advantage of this and I’m really curious to find out.
Anyway, with that said, I tried creating an initial tag for my project and based on the documentation of Subversion, this is done by creating a directory under the tags folder, usually named as your version number and then copying the source code you want to tag. This is automatically done though using svn commands or if you are a GUI person TortoiseSVN. So basically a new tag version of devel-0.1.1 would look like this in your project directory:
/myproject/tags/devel-0.1.1
I’m still confused as to what advantage this has to offer. For me, what CVS does makes more sense. Then again, I’m still a bit new about Subversion so my opinion may not really be acceptable for most people. I’ll soon learn a lot about Subversion, and I’ll revisit this first impression of mine. 
[tags]Subversion, CVS, Source Code Management, TortoiseSVN[/tags]
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