Community technical support mailing list was retired 2010 and replaced with a professional technical support team. For assistance please contact: Pre-sales Technical support via email to sales@march-hare.com.
Hi, folks. I've been asked by my employer to do a quick comparative demonstration of Subversion and CVSNT. We're replacing an older CVS installation, and have been evaluating both CVSNT and Subversion. I see that both do much of what we're looking for, such as atomic commits, binary deltas, and user authentication against our Windows Domain server. My background is in Perforce, so I'm no expert in either CVSNT or Subversion. As a result, I'm going to emphasize a few features of each, but I'd love to hear if you folks think I'm missing something important. To show off Subversion, I'm going to rename and relocate some directories and show how the files retain their history. I'll also make some branches and tags to compare speed, and then do some merges by changeset number and by branch name. I'll point out the convenience of viewing by changeset in a browser. If I have time, I'll look at some of the hook script possibilities. I'll also demonstrate some weaknesses by clobbering some changes by forgetfully merging changes more than once. Because other groups will also need to convert to our choice of source control, I'll mention some of the difficulties of converting a CVS repository and setting up svnserve or apache. To show off CVSNT, I'll start with showing how developers can keep using their familiar WinCVS client. I'll do some merges and show how they're tracked with mergepoints. I'll compare the ACL permissions to Subversion's functional but, I think, lesser permissions control. I'll show them the modules2 file (is there something like this for Subversion?) Against CVSNT, I'll show the difficulty of moving and renaming files. Changesets also seem more fragile under CVSNT; I'd love some insight around this. Both pieces of software seem strong. I don't mean to start off an interminable comparison war; I'd just like to figure out how to present both options to developers. Thanks in advance, folks.