On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 23:03:03 -0400 (AST)
"Marc G. Fournier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Sailesh Krishnamurthy wrote:
> 
> > Which brings me to another question .. has anybody considered using
> > subversion instead of CVS ?
> 
> Why?  not that I'm for a chance from something that isn't broken, but
> what advantages does subversion give us over what we already have?

  Subversion has lots of "little" benefits, but nothing that would be
  a major incentive to switch.  The biggest benefits I can think of
  of the top of my head are: 

  * Commits are actually atomic 
  * protocol sends diffs in both directions which speeds up everything
  * branching and tagging are cheap constant time operations

  * the time it takes to make changes is based on the size of the
    change, not the size of the project

  * whole directories are versioned not just files.  So for example
    if you for some reason wanted to rename src/backend/bootstrap.c
    to src/backend/bootup.c you wouldn't lose your revision history
    information.  Same thing goes for complete reorganizations of the
    file layouts.  

  * You can checkout "parts" of a project so if you need to fix a
    bug in 7.3.6's src/backend/ you only have to transfer that portion
    to you.  

  * cvs diff ( well svn diff ) can be done offline.  Same with 'status'
    which shows you your local modifications and 'revert' which reverts
    your changes back to your last checkout/update/etc. 

  * Revisions numbers are repository wide instead of by file.  You can
    refer to revision #14328 on hackers and everyone knows exactly what
    you are talking about and can switch their working copies to it
    easily ( svn switch -r 14328 ).  It's sort of like having a tag
    for every commit made to the repository. 

  It does have some downsides that I have found, most notibly that the
  size of your sources you have in your working copy are essentially 
  doubled.  There is a copy in your .svn directory that allows the
  offline status, diff, and revert commands to work. 

 ---------------------------------
   Frank Wiles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
   http://frank.wiles.org
 ---------------------------------


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