A Breath of Fresh Air

So, I have one of those projects that I've been meaning to tackle for a long time and I hadn't due to familiarity with my current system. That project is my making the move from the old and antiquated CVS version control to Subversion. What a difference Subversion makes over CVS...

I recently picked up the just released O'Reilly Version Control with Subversion 2nd Edition and started reading through that. I finally buckled down last night and decided to really start using it by setting up a repository and getting it working with Apache. Well, it was a long haul last night, which was no fault of Subversion, but instead, my ancient version of Apache 2 I had running on my server. After getting all of that straightened out last night (and finished tweaking today), I have to say that I'm quite happy with what I'm left with.

I started out creating an empty repository last night for a future web project and that went well. Today I decided to start converting some of my stuff over from CVS to SVN. I got the latest version of cvs2svn installed and started running it on a couple of CVS modules. It worked perfectly. It preserved all of my branches and tags and everything. It was even better than what I had hoped would happen.

One the things that I absolutely love is that I can use the AUTHZ_SVN module in Apache to set pretty fine access controls on my repositories, giving read and write access to who I want and where I want. I can now, finally, grant read access to my DictDefence project. You can check it out at https://svn.splitstreams.com:444/dictdefence/ if you want. The simple browser based read access is simple and beautiful.

I'm glad I finally started this transition and I hope that others go this direction as well.