Wrapping Up on Subversion

Well, it’s been a fun ride. I’ve done my best to share my experiences and hopefully a few people learned along with me. I know that Subversion has become a great part of my development cycle and that I will continue to use it and develop similar work cycles into the future. As a final hoorah for the series, I’m just going to mention a few things…

Graphical Clients

There are a few graphical clients available for SVN. As great as this sounds, I never found them to be as efficient, or even as understandable as the combination of the command line and a TextMate project. They do, however, provide you with a good interface for file management. One of the more popular for mac is called ZigVersion from ZigZig software, and on Windows there’s TortoiseSVN, available at Tigris.org, where Subversion finds its home.

Using the clients is pretty straightforward at this point. You can use them to check out your working copy, manage your files [add, remove, copy, move] and commit and revert changes. Different clients afford you different GUI’s, some with better file browsers than others. I have no recommendation because I haven’t found any that I like better than TextMate.

Alternatives

There are, of course, alternatives to the standard. The following are listed on the Revision Control entry on Wikipedia. I don’t have experience with any of them, although I’ve dabbled with Mercurial which looks interesting.

• Darcs
• Mercurial
• Bazaar
• Codeville
• LibreSource

Have fun!