Mauro and I are considering the move from CVS to subversion for Wget's version control. Although switching to subversion is not entirely uncontroversial, it has advantages that make it great food for thought.
CVS's network usage is appalling. I have a fairly slow upload link on my ADSL (the measly 384/64 kbps is the norm here), and committing the ChangeLog or any larger source file is a nightmare. Subversion is apparently smart enough to only upload the differences. `cvs update' is, for whatever reason abysmally slow, even when there are no changes to merge. Having to go to network for `cvs diff' is simply atrocious (subversion keeps around a pristine copy of the source and simply diffs against it) and seriously slows me down. Then there are modern features like atomic commits/updates, revisions that automatically span over the whole source tree, sane handling of file renames, sane(r) handling of branches, secure client authentication, etc., that point to subversion. There are other VC's to choose from, but the enticing things about subversion are: * It seems to be fairly stable and is now being used by some very large projects, including Apache, Samba, Mono, Zope, and (as of today) KDE. So far they don't seem to be regretting the move. * Its UI intentionally mimics CVS, while fixing the bogusness. This is a boon for those of us used to CVS, "those of us" including the vast majority of free software developers. * It is my impression that subversion is "boring" and "conservative" in the same sense in which Linux is boring -- it is striving not to implement the latest in academic research, but to have the features that are understood and have been tried elsewhere. I appreciate that, and I believe it sets subversion apart from the more ambitious of the competing projects, the proponents of which are very loud on slashdot, but that seemed to be much less used in practice. * It is apparently possible to migrate the entire CVS history of an existing project to subversion. That way our history will not be lost. I'd like to hear arguments pro and con. I'm also interested in information about free svn hosting. sunsite/dotsrc and savannah.gnu.org currently don't seem to be offering subversion hosting. There is www.berlios.de, but I have no experience with them.
