Learning is an Art

Subversion 1.5 is out and its been almost half year to it. Now thought comes to mind where to go from here, Subversion has still a long way to go from here, Subversion developers should not content with accomplishments in 1.5 its still a long way for Subversion to go to be an enterprise software, having said that I would also like to point that penetration of Subversion in enterprise environment has considerably increased but still it has an uphill task and I am sure that Subversion development team is aware of same.

I am big fan of Subversion thats why I sometime ponder about its future, when I see fanatics talking about GIT, Clearcase and Perforce. I was really saddened when Linus trovalds in his speech said “whole point the Subversion project started is wrong” but I have not found anything wrong with the tool, may be I am not as capable as Linus and neither I am into kernel development but Subversion works pretty well for me and so does for my organization, and there are many other Subversion works for them too.

There is a big wish list which people might have for Subversion but I would say to Subversion developer community add the features which are good for tool as whole and keep in mind that Subversion is version control first anything else later.

It’s been long time and we keep hearing a lot about Subversion 1.5. I am a bit curious and tempted to see what actually it has to offer us.
I went through all the stuff on the Collabnet website and tried all the stuff there, even the available binaries of Subversion 1.5 and Eclipse GUI client for same. Don’t worry, I am not going to discuss advance merging and tracking and all, I will just give you a walk through of what all features it has in store for you. I wanted to write this document because I was looking for a document which is short and sweet and gives me crispy details, of what all things are about to come, though I didn’t find one but I hope that this will the end of your search for such a document, provided you are searching for something like that. I will discuss a few of the key features which will be available in Subversion 1.5.

Merge Tracking: We all needed it desperately and it’s going to be out in some time. Presently Subversion offers branching and merging but does not record them in history. Subversion 1.5 will give auto merging facility and manual merging facility and will maintain its history which change sets were merged and when they were merged, so now it‘s not required to remember the merges performed. SVN command blame and log will also give the details of merges in history. The presently available client on collabnet is for Eclipse and it offers two types of merges: Standard merge based on URL and revision inputs and advanced merge (exposes all command line options). You will not get the installer for it; you can automatically install it through the update/install option available in eclipse menu.

Sparse Directory checkouts: This is also one of the much needed additions. Presently in Subversion when you check out a directory you get all the directories below it in your working copy whether you need it or not. You have the option of only checking out top level folder, which is not enough. This becomes a messy business in large projects. Now with Subversion 1.5 you can check out selected subdirectories by specifying depth. Something like giving _depth = files.

Backing up FSFS repositories Subversion 1.5 way: This is a nice little feature added that will help make administration of FSFS repositories a little bit easier, especially when it comes to backup. The new feature is that `svnadmin recover` has now something to do for FSFS repositories. Most of you might not have come across it. It is one of those little features that were invented for the Berkeley DB repositories.

Tree Structured FSFS repository: This might not be of much interest to many but its there for you. Presently we have revisions stored in a single directory as db\revs\0 for revision zero and so on and so forth for revprops. This can lead to a single directory with large number of files. People relate some speed issues with it which I cannot understand. If you get it, do let me know. In Subversion 1.5, the structure has changed slightly. Newly-created FSFS repositories will instead use a two-level tree with up to (by default) 1000 files per directory. This means that revisions 0-999 will be stored in a directory db/revs/0/, revisions 1000-1999 will be stored in db/revs/1/, and so on.

Copy/Move improvements: Presently available move and copy is not true move; it is a two step procedure – first the deletion of old files and then the addition of new ones. In Subversion 1.5 we can expect a true copy and move or even rename.

There are few more features, but I am not going to discuss them here. The above mentioned ones are what I thought might interest people.