Subversion is a highly popular version control system used worldwide. It succeeds CVS and aims to rectify its shortcomings. Subversion, like any other version control system, is used to maintain current and historical revisions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation.

Hosted Subversion Service allows you to host your subversion server and data on a remote server which you can access securely (must-have feature) over the internet. Most hosted subversion service has a minimal free plan followed by a paid subscription.

We have previously posted comprehensive review of hosted subversion services. Today we will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of hosted subversion services in details.

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I am using Ant (Java based build system) for our project. Ant is an exceptionally powerful build system and should be the only build system you will ever need. You don't really need code monsters like Maven (or pile of …. as Bileblogger loves to say). With little effort here's what I achieved in few hours (aside from the obvious capability of compiling, running, building jar files etc.): Full article (498 words) »

This is a comprehensive list of hosted subversion subversion (source code repository) service. I did not include the list of hosted subversion service providers who restrict to only open source projects like sourceforge or tigris. Full article (460 words) »

I discovered a really cool way to use Subversion, my favorite version control system - automatic versioning / commit on save. Essentially with this simple tweak you can use subversioned files like you would use any ordinary files. You can open them in any editor, create or delete them. When you save a file it is actually saved and versioned in a remote subversion repository. Similarly the other file operations are transparently supported from a remote subversion installation. This greatly simplifies the life of new users and pros alike. You do not have to repeatedly remind your users to commit changes to repositories and no changes will ever be lost. Experienced users can still view history and do more complex operations. Full article (313 words) »

In directories under subversion there may be files which you do not want to add to subversion. Normally such files would show in subversion status (svn stat) with ? in front of them. This is useful to let you find files that you may have missed. However in some cases there are files you want to intentionally miss, such files then merely clutter the status display. There is a simple fix.

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I was recently introduced to Mercurial, a new distributed version control system people are talking about. Version control systems are central to any development team and a choice shouldn't be made lightly as you will often find your development process limited by the limitations of the system. We use Subversion, a decision I made after long exposure to it and making myself fully confortable with the system and finding a way around its limitations. I haven't done a similar exploration with Mercurial yet. However as I am always interested in improving my process, I briefly looked into Mercurial documents and went through the wonderful presentation by Bryan O'Sullivan, Senior Principal Engineer at QLogic, in Google Tech Talk session. Here are few observations.

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Traditionally companies choose Windows as their desktop environment and often for their intranet servers too. Windows is generally perceived as being easier to use and administer and mostly with good reason. And yet I selected Linux as the desktop and server platform for our massive (by our scale) infrastructure upgrade. In the following paragraphs I will explain the rationale for the decision and will also document our subsequent experience moving forward.

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First of all identify the file(s) for which you want to know the revision number from PHP. Then add a property to the file as follows:
svn propset svn:keywords Revision file_name.php

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