Subversion 1.7 to enable Git-like features
Written by James Bailey Friday, 19 February 2010 10:53
WANdisco announced on Wednesday that they’ll be committing their development resources to Subversion 1.7, with a release date set for this summer along with the news that it will also enable some Git-like features.
Earlier on Wednesday we shared a video from Hyrum Wright, WANdisco’s Director of Open Source, where he spoke of some of the changes we could expect in the next release of Subversion, which signals an exciting time for the Subversion project.
We often see and hear discussion between developers talking about the merits of Subversion and Git. One of the main talking points is often the speed of doing various things in Subversion, such as merging or checking out the repository, as well as the ability to perform offline commits.
Subversion 1.7 will release with Next Generation Working Copy (WC-NG), enhancing the existing working copy functionality with centralised metadata storage and improved extensibility. This will provide the groundwork to allow offline commits and other features associated with Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) such as Git and Mercurial.
It will also include HTTPv2, an update to the existing WebDAV HTTP protocol, which will improve performance, which also continuing to allow web access to subversion, making its use a more enjoyable experience for developers worldwide.
Additionally, Subversion 1.7 will offer a number of new features and enhancements, improving performance and ease of use. These will include augmented diff representation (svn patch), allowing the merging of patch files, amongst others.
We often hear from Git users who have questioned why Subversion is trying to “copy” Git in order to progress. I’d argue that that’s not necessarily the case. There are certainly some Git features that appeal to developers, so to me it would make perfect sense for Subversion to include similar changes, whilst also offering the centralised repositories which appeal to a large number of corporates wanting all their data in one place, thus appealing to a larger number of developers.
Now, we understand that this topic, along with some of the previous ones we’ve brought up, can be one that is debated over and over again. We’d love to hear from Git and Subversion users alike. Why not spend a moment signing up to our site (it’s free!) and let us know what you think in this forum thread?
We look forward to hearing from you.
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written by Development, February 19, 2010
Long live SVN!
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written by Raj, March 03, 2010
Companies often have policies and requirements which sometime comes from legal/compliance requirements to protect their intellectual property frpm external we well as internal parties.
Where git is great where you don’t really worry about who might get access to your code base or if the location where it’s stored is secured in terms of read access or write access.
This is fine in the open source world or for companies who dosnt need to worry about who gets/sees what bits of code or were their employees work. But this type of thing is hard to control in a decentralized scm therefor most companies who have have strict requirements opt for a replicated centralized model.
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written by Andreas Krey, March 04, 2010
The problem of that being, of course, that with the advent of git-svn the centralization can be subverted even easier than before.
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I'm currently using mercurial, git and subversion! What I really like in Git is as mentioned in your post the ability to offline commit. This gives me the change in an agile and continuously integrated project to do smaller commits locally and if I have a somehow stable batch I can commit these changes to the remote repository. So I'm very excited about this new feature in subversion!
Daniel