TortoiseSVN and Subversion Version Control

[PaulKroll]

Joel On Software (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) referenced one of their documents (http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/docs/40/Articles/SourceControl/TortoiseSVN.html) for customers of Fog Creek Software (http://www.fogcreek.com/) (Joel's company), about Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/), on their home page (and its use with their FogBugz product, of course).

I was aware of Subverison as Yet Another Version Control system, but was entire UNaware of TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/). I've installed and am playing with it now... and it's pretty sweet. Probably will bring this into work where we've got the hideous old Visual Source Safe with its "I'm on the edge of destruction!" datastore. TortoiseSVN is incorporated into the Windows shell, so once it's set up, you can access version control on your files with a right-click in any My Computer or Windows Explorer window.

You don't need to pull down Subversion separately if you get TortoiseSVN, unless you're setting up a server. If you're only using it on your machine, it's all in there. (For work, I'd be setting it up as a server so everyone can access it, but at home, not so much.)

Currently the FogCreek server seems to be inaccessible, because, of course, I've typed this all in and now don't want to redo it at a later time. :dunno: It'll be back soon I'm sure.

[sheila]

Yes, I've used TortoiseSVN on my windows machines for...oh, at least a year now. But not for commits and stuff...just to check the status of files in my explorer views.

For actual commits and so forth, I prefer RapidSVN.

Not sure if this is because I am only using SVN on a remote server (not on my local machine) or not...

Anyhow, in the fwiw category.

On my Mac I was having a tough time finding an SVN client (other than the command line interface) that I was comfortable with. However, recently BBEdit incorporated Subversion functionality into their text editor, and so now I mostly use that on the Mac.

[complete]

I have just installed TortoiseSVN.

As luck would have it, you two are the fist people I have found who have used the interface.

I have some questions if you would like to help out a newbee.

[sheila]

Well, go ahead and ask your questions. I don't use Tortoise a whole lot myself. But maybe Paul can answer. Or, who knows, someone else may come out of the woodwork and chip in with hints...

[Snarpy]

Um, I don't know the first thing about version control, but I wondered what you all thought about Monotone (http://venge.net/monotone/) .monotone is a free distributed version control system. it provides a simple, single-file transactional version store, with fully disconnected operation and an efficient peer-to-peer synchronization protocol. it understands history-sensitive merging, lightweight branches, integrated code review and 3rd party testing. it uses cryptographic version naming and client-side RSA certificates. it has good internationalization support, has no external dependencies, runs on linux, solaris, OSX, windows, and other unixes, and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Just being...curious.

Snarpy

[Bruce]

Um, I don't know the first thing about version control, but I wondered what you all thought about Monotone (http://venge.net/monotone/) .Ahhh, my kingdom for the perfect revision control system. I currently use Subversion, and have used CVS. I switched from CVS to Subversion because of the many features lacking from CVS, and I have been starting to feel the problems with the lack of distributed operation and easy branches in Subversion. Having said that, Subversion is miles ahead of CVS in usefulness, and I have been very pleased with its operation.

Personally, I have been keeping my eye closely on Mercurial (http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/), which was spawned out of Linus Torvalds great quest for a system to replace BitKeeper[1]. I had also been looking closely at darcs (http://abridgegame.org/darcs/) and Bazaar-NG (http://bazaar-ng.org/). Unfortunately, everything I have looked at (including Monotone) is lacking or problematic in some way. The other three I have mentioned appear to be the closest to getting it right, but Mercurial and Bazaar-NG are immature, and Darcs is inefficient and has scaling issues (not to mention being written in a language few developers, myself included, understand).

You can find a lot more information at The Better SCM Initiative (http://better-scm.berlios.de/) and this writeup (http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/software/vc/derivatives.html) about the 2 fundamental types of version control systems.

[1] Linus doesn't actually use Mercurial, but his quest was a big part of the motivation to make it happen, from what I recall.

[hobbes]

So, anyone using TortoiseSVN (or other VS app) with your FQ account serving as the repository?