Subversion (is great)

You’ve most likely become very familiar with some type of source or version control software when developing applications. These types of software keep track of changes and allow you to revert to old file versions. They also usually allow for branching and controlling the codebase in very intricate ways.

Most of the open source world uses Subversion which I also prefer. They even make a windows distribution which isn’t terribly difficult to set up. There is a great entry over at Coding Horror that describes the basics excellently.

I am a pretty big Windows guy, and, at least in my (limited) experience, it seems I don’t run across people running this type software as much. It’s not (I don’t think) that projects I’ve been involved with were amateur, however I can only sheepishly point out all of the horrible problems I have had to deal with that would have been avoided using some kind of subversioning software.

And on that note, I found myself setting up subversion on one of my boxes here at home for all of the various personal projects I’ve got going. It’s not only nice to know that I am that much less likely to lose an important project, but I also find it’s great to be able to see my progression in each project.

Other links:
TortoiseSVN – A great UI for Windows that integrates in Explorer’s context menu
Visual SVN – A fairly robust management UI for running Subversion on Windows

Tags: svn

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