[Discuss] Possible backup scenarios for a 500GB drive

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-10-27 22:03-0700 John Blomfield wrote:

> Why did you convert projects from CVS to subversion?  In what way is 
> subversion superior?

>From http://subversion.tigris.org/
"The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system
that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community."

They have reached their goal or surpassed it.  I had been using CVS since
2000, and it was "good enough" to get a lot of work done, but after about a
half hour of trying subversion earlier this year for the first time, I never
wanted to go back to CVS ever again and deeply regretted I had waited so
long to try subversion. Compared to CVS, subversion has far superior syntax
(in the sense of consistency), chews up a lot less bandwidth, has nice
features for renaming or moving files and directories and putting symlinks
under version control, has a great "svn help" facility, is rock solid, has
an extremely active development community, and has better documentation
(the book I mentioned before).

However, despite all those good subversion qualities, my impression is it's
idea of a central code repository (copied from CVS) does not scale well to
projects with large numbers of developers such as the Linux kernel.
Therefore, such projects use distributed revision control systems like git
which no longer have a central repository.  When Linus first adopted a
distributed revision control system he actually picked a proprietary one
(bitkeeper) because there were no free ones available.  Although bitkeeper
made Linus _much_ more productive, that proprietary choice was bad politics 
and extremely divisive, and as a result Linus was forced to write his own
free distributed version control system called git which has turned into his
second great contribution to free software.  My impression is that git
satisfies the practical needs of the Linux developer community much better
than bitkeeper ever did which is probably the principal reason that kernel
development right now is proceeding much more rapidly than ever before.  And
git is so good that other projects (e.g., cairo) are beginning to adopt it
as well.

So my advice is to learn subversion for your first version control system
(or your first post-CVS version control system) but be open to other free
possibilities as well such as git for the future.

> Is there a GUI like cervisia?

I haven't tried any GUI for subversion yet because I prefer the command-line
(especially when svn syntax is so logical and straightforward compared to
the cvs mess), but for those who like GUI's, a google search revealed
rapidsvn (http://rapidsvn.tigris.org/), and there may be other subversion
GUI's as well.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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