Cvs - Svn

[X.Cyclop]

What's the difference between CVS & SVN?

[Javasnob]

CVS is older, so everyone uses it. Subversion's creators claim it's better, but I don't have any evidence for that. I personally use Subversion for all my versioning; I find it easier to use.

[Vergil83]

wikipedia is always useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...ntrol_software

[ImNeat]

Silly people. CVS stands for Consumer Value Store. I worked at CVS/pharmacy all through high school, I would know...

[X.Cyclop]

Thanks!

But, what apps do you recommend?

I only have seen Cervisia and Kompare, but i suppose there is more.

[DThor]

None, personally. If you're coding, you'll be quite used to the command line, unless you're using an IDE like Komodo, which has support for CVS/SVN built into it. Perhaps if you're into versioning something other than code, then it's useful. Pick between CVS and SVN first, then decide on a GUI(their websites have lots of pointers to options there, since they're mostly free, best to try for yourself). I find them kind of clunky. myself - faster just to use svn on the command line.

I strongly recommend SVN over CVS. Not only does it have numerous basic abilties lacking in CVS like versioning binaries, but it's far, far less obscure. CVS has a long a venerable history, consequently has rules and syntax that just make you go "huh?". The only advantage CVS holds IMHO is that being far older, it's probably less likely to run into troubles. If you're used to it, great. Otherwise I'd never recommend it as a first versioning system.

DT

P.S. the subversion site has a great big fat readme and free docs that clearly outline the differences between the two, btw.

[drl]

Hi.

The networking outfit for which I worked used cvs. That was because cvs was the best solution at that time, and it was very good at coordinating the work of many developers. It was used for nightly builds. It was clearly an improvement over RCS, but like RCS before it, there were some drawbacks.

If you are doing development, particularly in an agile manner, then you will be refactoring continuously. Subversion allows you to manipulate directories just like you manipulate files, whereas that task is difficult with cvs. I have a small network, and I found that setting up a subversion repository for network access was easier compared to cvs (I used SuSE 9 with both).

I agree with DThor that using subversion from the command line is natural for those doing code development. You rarely do more than one checkout, but you do checkins frequently (usually at least twice a day).

I found Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion, Mike Mason, Pragmatic Bookshelf to be very useful in addition to the information available at the site http://subversion.tigris.org/, and there is an online book there from O'Reilly (one of the best publishers for things *nix) ... cheers, drl

[Krendoshazin]

Right now I'd recommend both cvs and svn, some sites have switched to svn, and some to cvs, and I don't believe you can use svn for cvs, and certainly not visa versa. So choosing one or the other is not a matter of choice, it's a matter of need, if a site uses svn (like mplayer now does), use that, and keep cvs handy for people still using cvs.

The benefits that are spoken of are of benefit to the people that host the files you're downloading, you'll probably never see any benefits yourself by using svn, except maybe the fact I no longer find myself needing to log into things first and then grabbing the source, all you'll see is a simple 'svn checkout svn://svn.this.address/this/code directory'.