Donnie’s Blog

I have to admit, I always react with some skepticism when I hear of anything whose main selling-point is that it is “better than something else.” Such was my reaction when I began to seriously look into Subversion, whose main selling point is that it is “better than CVS.”

I guess this approach mainly caters to people who are disenchanted with CVS in one way or another, but honestly, I think that CVS is fine. And, so far in my investigations of Subversion, I have mainly concluded that it is similar to CVS, but I haven’t seen much in Subversion that has made me think, “Wow! How in the world did I survive all this time without that feature? My life will be so much easier now!”

I mean, people get annoyed with not being able to rename directories in CVS?? If that’s the most annoying problem in your software development project then I want to work there! Atomic commits, fast tagging/branching, efforts to improve binary-file storage efficiency (although I have to see that one to believe it), all nice things, but I wasn’t really bothered by CVS’ lack of those features anyway. So, Subversion strikes me more as “similar to CVS,” not “better than.”

But, I’m going to be using Subversion for a large software project in the near future, and maybe my perspective will change over time. I’m kind of doubtful though, since I like tried and true workhorses. And I know I can use CVS effectively in very sophisticated development projects, because I’ve done it for years.

Subversion has one feature that I am intrigued by, and that’s WebDAV support. That I want to play around with - it could be really cool to incorporate into web-projects. But, I think I’ll keep using CVS for my personal projects for now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.