Subversion Intro

I've been using subversion (nope, not a git guy yet) for most of my own work, even got our projects at my current job onto subversion. It's much better than source safe/offsite (which I used at a previous job) and I even prefer it to CVS. Subversion is designed specifically to be a modern replacement for CVS and shares a number of the same key developers. It uses a copy-modify-merge for file sharing. To read more about subversion, you can read their very good documentation at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/. The following is a link to an appendix from the svnbook that introduces subversion for cvs users. I think that it will be a very helpful and painless way to quickly understand subversion with a cvs background. You can read it starting at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.2/svn.forcvs.html.

Subversion’s homepage is http://subversion.tigris.org/. I install it using the instructions found on http://www.excastle.com/blog/archive/2005/05/31/1048.aspx.

The most direct way of using subversion is through the subversion client tool called svn. You can download the tool from subversion’s site, http://subversion.tigris.org/. For directions on using the tool, refer to the appropriate section at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/.

Another subversion client option for Win32 users is TortoiseSVN, which is implemented as a Windows shell extension. TortoiseSVN can be downloaded from http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/. It is very simple and intuitve to use as all commands are added to the right click context menu when using windows explorer. Special icons are used to show which files and folders are under revision control.

If you're using Eclipse, there is a plugin called SubClipse that will integrate Eclipse and Subversion. You can download the plug-in from http://subclipse.tigris.org/. A good guide to installation and usage for the plug-in can be found at http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2005/11/subclipse.html?page=1.