Once again, another open source project has dropped Concurrent Versions System (CVS) for Subversion (SVN). Both CVS and SVN are open source version control systems used mainly by developers involved in various software projects. This time the project is phpBB, a forum application.

We like to announce the switch from CVS to SVN for our repository management and source control. Within this step, we also set up a new home for phpBB development and phpBB related projects. At the moment only phpBB itself is listed and only repository management handled there. Within the next months we will enable more and more features and move internal projects as well as hopefully other public projects to the new home. [Link]

Although I'm not much of a developer, I've been interested for some time in why a project has picked one version control system over another. In part this is because I recognize revision control is something my own employer need to do better, not just for the larger projects but even the "local" non-enterprise projects I often found myself involved in.

Except for some Python programming, I've done very little software development this decade with most of my efforts in the 80's and 90's (BASIC, Pascal, Perl, Tcl, etc). Those that know me know I've wanted to dig more into PHP and Ruby, but I have been distracted by one sorry excuse after another.

For work and my status as a Drupal Developer Wannabe I've also been making the effort to learn more about revision control. One issue I have is that at work the consensus has been to use Subversion for version control while the Drupal community prefers CVS. It shouldn't be too difficult to master both version control systems, but for whatever reason my brain cells in that department haven't switched on.

Luckily, I just came across a nice how-to tutorial by Nick Sergeant (first time I've come across his name too).

After reading the Pro Drupal Development book, and becoming a recent Subversion junkie, I’ve learned to do all of my Drupal and Contributed Module management through a combination of CVS and Subversion.

Through this post, I’m going to attempt to take you through all of the steps of managing your Drupal installation as well as any contributed modules you may need to utilize.

The tutorial is called, Painless Drupal revision control with CVS and Subversion. This how-to by Nick Sergeant should be a big help for the Drupal Developer Wannabe that would like to or needs to do their work in Subversion and not CVS. As I'm no expert, if you see any corrections that need to be made to the tutorial, please leave a comment over at Nick's blog.

"Individual developers can use sites like SourceForge.net to host multiple projects, but such sites are not well suited to college environments that have many student programming projects to host. DrProject is a multiple project hosting application designed for schools. It gives each project a wiki, bug tracker, and source code repository.

DrProject is a fork of the Trac project, which can only host project at a time. DrProject has a different look and feel but the navigation menu is very similar to Trac's."

Complete Story

I spend too much time sticking my nose where it likely doesn't belong.  Check out Dries comments toward the Drupal project using CVS and my own comments somewhere below his.  I argue that SVN is the correct choice.  I'm unqualified to really know the answer.  Sort of like me telling Bill Gates that dropping the current Windows code and starting something new would be better for Microsoft in the long run.

"Technologies are changing so quickly around us that it's hard to find and integrate good software before its replacement has gone mainstream. For this reason, I'm always on the prowl for what's new and hot.

A couple days ago, I was checking up on the status of Wordpress 2.1, which is supposed to have exciting new features like pseudo cron and spell checking. I came across Wordpress's defect/feature management system, Trac. Just to be clear, Wordpress isn't the author of Trac."

Complete Story

No surprise, yet still of interest.  The Ruby Language project is officially dropping their CVS and fully using SVN for version control.  I only wish one of my favorite open source projects would just start the move from CVS to SVN.

CVS services (including CVSup and CVSweb) will be permanently unavailable on Fri Mar 16 03:00 UTC 2007. The source code repositry has been moved to SVN.

If you require the CVS repositry, please get it by CVSup till that day.

You can access the original post at Ruby-Lang.org by clicking here.

I have been doing a lot of reading lately.  More specifically, I have been reading a lot of IT reference books.  In fact, I venture to say that I'm probably one of the few people who ever brought a book on version control systems to the hospital while waiting for neurosurgery.  I really didn't  get much read that day, but I think I still get bragging rights!

Below are the list of IT books I'm currently reading.  Except for the book on Subversion, the other two books are more to refresh my memory and keep me up to date with the latest changes taking place in Fedora Core (Linux) as well as PHP/MySQL.  I wouldn't call any of the three books required reading, but I would say that these type of books do assist those in IT  in the areas of professional development.  Let me also give notice that the links provided to Amazon.com reference my associates account with them.

• Pragmatic Version Control: Using Subversion (The Pragmatic Starter Kit Series)(2nd Edition)
• Red Hat Fedora Core 6 Unleashed
• PHP and MySQL Web Development (3rd Edition) (Developer's Library)