Re: cvs or svn for common light weight users

[Michael Haggerty]

address@hidden wrote:
> Not starting a religious war I hope but many of you may have seen
> things like I have around the linux community saying cvs is on its way
> out and svn is the `wave of the future'.  Is this just someones
> opinion mostly or is there something to it?

IMHO CVS is dead.  Subversion covers the problem space of CVS much more
cleanly and so completely that the only reason I can think of not to
switch from CVS to Subversion is that you have chosen to switch to a
distributed version control system (like Mercurial, git, bazaar, etc.)
instead.

The Subversion workflow is very similar to that of CVS, and thus little
relearning is required.  Documentation and tool support are excellent,
and both free Subversion hosting for open-source projects and commercial
support for Subversion are easily available if desired.

Of course, as the maintainer of cvs2svn [1] I am not unbiased.  But that
is partly because I have intimate knowledge of the shortcomings of the
CVS repository format.

CVSNT appears to remedy some of CVS's shortcomings, but does not fix the
overall brokenness of the CVS repository format (e.g., extremely slow
tagging of large repositories).  It is also quite commercial and rather
out of the mainstream; for example, few CVS tools work with CVSNT.  If
you switch to CVSNT you will make your eventual and inevitable migration
to a more modern VCS more painful.

Michael

[1] cvs2svn (http://cvs2svn.tigris.org) is a free tool for converting
CVS repositories to either Subversion or git.  It aims to preserve all
of the information that was in the CVS repository (including tags,
branches, authors, log messages, etc) and also reconstructs as much as
possible of the metadata that CVS has failed to record or thrown away
(for example changesets, default branch history, etc).