Subversion - A Compelling Alternative to CVS and BitKeeper

Note about Relevance

As of 2018, this site has become mostly irrelevant.

Introduction

First of all note, that I said alternative and not replacement. While Subversion can easily take on CVS any day, (except for a few missing features, which are going to be implemented soon enough), it by no means has everything BitKeeper has to offer. At least not yet. Still, Subversion is good enough to be used instead of either CVS or BitKeeper.

That cannot be said of other version control systems I tried, namely Aegis and Arch. In this article, I'd like to explain why.

The CVS/BitKeeper/Subversion Way of Doing Things

It took me time to get used to CVS. After I knew CVS pretty well, it took me some time to get used to BitKeeper. After that, there were still some things in Subversion that surprised me. However, working with all of them on a day to day basis, is more similar than not.

There is such a principle as the "Keep it Simple, Stupid" (KISS). CVS is easy to get used to because it adheres to this principles. Most newbies can get by with cvs commit, cvs checkout, and add. Afterwards, they can learn about cvs update, branching, tagging, merging and everything else. BitKeeper is a bit more complex due to its explicit changesets and distributed nature, but it is still fairly easy to use with a subset of the commands. The same is true of Subversion, where the commands are practically identical to CVS at this point.

A real test of the simplicity of an SCM is how much it takes to set up a repository and commit a single file into it. This is fairly trivial to do in either of these programs. Aegis, OTOH as the transcripts of my IRC session with Mark Veltzer show, took a lot of commands, and a lot of tweaking of text files (as well as downloading and installing the separate program fhist) just to get started. Even Mark did not know the commands by heart.

When I tried Arch and followed the instructions in the Linux Journal article it took me three tries, a lot of improvising and a great deal of commands just to get started. Arch expects everything to be done explicitly - starting an initial project, an initial branch, an initial change etc. It's not a simple "modify; check in ; modify; check in" cycle.

Conclusion

Most programmers who use CVS like it enough and for a good reason. It keeps several versions of the files, lets you branch them, tag them, and merge them, and does it quickly and in a straightforward manner. For the same reason people will like Subversion (or BitKeeper) as well. What it does not do is enforce a particular working model that differs from this simple minded approach.

In Aegis, I had to specify what test to run, who will be the reviewer of the code, and many other things that have nothing to do with version control. Maybe it is better for large, distributed teams. Then again, there are some large scale projects out there (like KDE, GNOME or FreeBSD) which successfully use CVS. They could convert to Subversion and enjoy less of CVS' limitations without changing the working model.

As for BitKeeper, it is not suitable for wide deployment by open-source projects because of its license. If this license is modified to a much more reasonable one, one can expect open source projects to widely convert to it. Still, subversion may still be useful for the development of in-house and proprietary software, as it requires no licensing, which some software houses cannot afford or are not willing to pay.

For the record, despite its limitations in comparison to BitKeeper, I found Subversion very nice and enjoyable to use, which is expected as I can even get myself to use CVS. While it is possible that I would have preferred to use BitKeeper, if it were possible to me. But since it isn't, I must say, that Subversion corrects most of the standing issues with CVS very well, and is quite enjoyable to work with. It is even used to maintain this site. ;-)

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