Subversion: Free commercial grade version control system

Posted by Anuj Seth

October 30, 2008

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Subversion (SVN) is a version control system initiated in 2000 by CollabNet Inc. Many believe it to be a successor to the very popular CVS system. But, SVN incorporates features and functionality far beyond what CVS offered.

Subversion is well-known in the open source community and is used on many open source projects, including Apache Software Foundation, SourceForge.net and Tigris.org. Google Code also provides Subversion hosting for their open source projects.

The rest of the article assumes you have a Windows Server and Windows Client. Subversion is not limited to just Windows. It is widely used in the Unix world as well.

For those not very familar with the installation and administration of Subversion, VisualSVN Server is highly recomended. It enabled SVN Server to be installed on Windows and comes with an MMC snap-in, making it extremely easy to administer and configure the SVN server.

As far as clients are concerned, TortoiseSVN and ankhsvn provides UI based clients. While TortoiseSVN integrates within Windows Explorer, ankhsvn is an add-on to Visual Studio.

A very impressive feature available in SVN is the ability to be able to sync (mirror) the SVN database with a remote mirror. The remote mirror will be read-only, but this enables access to the code base for teams spread across locations. There are some commercial SVN servers that allow multiple read-write mirrors, but that will be covered in a different post.

This is an initial post to just introduce you to the world of Subversion. We will get into more details about SVN in the coming days/weeks.

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