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.

"Open-source projects often face the problem of keeping track of a project's code, while avoiding stifling developers' creativity. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, claims it has a solution to that problem: Bazaar 1.0, its new version control system.

Unlike most VCSs (version control systems), Bazaar is a distributed, rather than centralized, system."

Complete Story at Linux-Watch

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

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."

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.

Congratulations to the Ruby language folks for converting their CVS repository over to Subversion (SVN). From what the "experts" tell me, it is not easy moving your developers over to another version control system. At least that's what was hinted when I asked the question, CVS or Subversion?

The difficulty of moving a project to a different version control system likely has just as much to do with cultural issues as it does with technical issues. To ask a developer to use a version control system when they never have used a version control system before is difficult enough. To ask a developer to spend a day or two to learn a new version control system over the one they're currently using is three times more difficult.

For the organization that I work for, we've settled on SVN. A lot of the developers in our field offices are used to programming alone, thus most of then have never used a version control system. I believe we'll find SVN is the right choice for the new projects we're starting up.