[this announcement is available online at https://s.apache.org/osr65 ]
Community-led Version Control Software and Source Code Management Tool
Available on Most Integration Servers, Integrated Development Environments,
Issue Tracking Systems, and more.
Wakefield, MA —28 May 2020— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the
all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source
projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® Subversion® 1.14.0-LTS, the
latest release of the popular centralized software version control system.
Apache Subversion ("SVN") provides a version controlled backing store for any
kind of data. It records an accurate log of changes made to that data over
time, and keeps track of who made them. Subversion allows users to commit files
and directories, recover previous revisions, and even maintain multiple
variations of their work in parallel. Able to service projects of any size,
from individuals up to large scale collaborative efforts, Subversion is ideal
for work in vast swaths of industries, from software development to
semiconductor design, scientific research to medical technology. An Apache
Top-Level Project for over a decade, Subversion celebrated its 20th Anniversary
earlier this year.
"First and foremost, I'd like to thank all of our developers and community
members who helped make this release possible," said Nathan Hartman, Vice
President of Apache Subversion. "We are excited to publish our latest LTS
release, and the first in the 1.14 line."
As an LTS release, the focus is on stability and availability. These are
achieved through the project's policies. For any change in core code to be
included in updates to 1.14.x, the change must first undergo a process of
nomination and voting for backport. At least three Subversion developers must
support the change, with none having concerns about it.
LTS (Long Term Support) is an industry designation that a particular release
line is planned to be maintained for a longer period of time than regular,
non-LTS releases. For the Subversion project, this means that later updates to
the 1.14.x series may contain bug fixes and security updates only. Any bleeding
edge new features, even if developed during the lifetime of 1.14.x, will have
to be introduced in a separate release line. Server operators and system
administrators usually prefer LTS releases for stability, while end users often
choose the latest release (LTS or not) to get the newest features.
Numerous third parties provide Subversion install packages for Windows, macOS,
Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and other operating systems. To maximize platform
independence, Subversion is implemented with strict conformance to ISO C90, one
of the most widely supported software coding standards worldwide. In addition,
the Subversion developers provide bindings that enable integrations with
software coded in popular web languages: Java, Ruby, Perl, and Python.
Particularly noteworthy for this release, Subversion's language bindings for
Python received significant attention. Python 3 is supported, up from Python 2
in prior Subversion releases, an oft requested improvement that keeps
Subversion 1.14.0-LTS current with the changing Python landscape. While this
was a major undertaking, the project also tackled the challenge of maintaining
compatibility with the older Python 2. This legacy support is expected to phase
out gradually, as Python 3 continues to gain mindshare across the computing
industry, but the Subversion project has a long tradition of maintaining
compatibility wherever practical, giving operators of legacy systems some
much-needed breathing room as they make the transition.
Among Subversion's strengths are its extensive support for working with giant
repositories. The bedrock of this support is its centralized model, which
allows users to check out only the portions of a repository that they need. The
ASF uses Subversion this way in its own infrastructure, housing more than 80 of
its Apache Top-Level Projects and sub-projects comprising millions of lines of
code, including Subversion itself, in a single Subversion repository that makes
all 1.8 million revisions of that information available to collaborators
worldwide.
When dealing with such vast amounts of data, including all of its revisions,
one might wonder about storage costs. Subversion uses a variety of techniques
to minimize storage, including temporal compression, spacial compression, and
data deduplication.
Another improvement in Subversion 1.14.0-LTS is a new tool in support of
deduplication that could help some administrators reduce future storage costs.
The deduplication feature uses an internal database named rep-cache.db. If
deduplication was previously disabled, the database may not contain all
necessary entries. The new feature, known as the 'svnadmin build-repcache'
command, allows re-adding such missing entries and provides a way for those who
had previously turned off deduplication to regain some of its benefits.
The release also includes several experimental features. One of these, Shelving
and Checkpointing, allows users to save, restore, and roll back snapshots of
their work, without making commits to the central repository. This is useful
for setting aside a work in progress to work on something else, or for taking
temporary snapshots when a network connection to the server is unavailable.
Another experimental feature, Viewspec, allows users who create different
cross-sections or "views" into their version controlled data, to save the
layouts of those views and easily recreate them later. These experimental
features are designated as such because they are not yet considered
feature-complete. In Subversion 1.14.0-LTS, they are turned off and hidden by
default, but are made available on an opt-in basis to entice open source
community members to help further their development.
Subversion users, developers, and other stakeholders routinely communicate with
each other through email lists. One ongoing discussion taking place there
centers around a proposal to make Subversion even stronger at handling big
files. The discussion thread, titled "Who else is using SVN for
large-binary-asset storage?" has already generated some enthusiasm.
"Apache Subversion is more than code, it's a community," added Hartman. "As an
open source and purely volunteer-driven effort, we thrive on participation from
enthusiastic users and developers worldwide. We welcome their involvement in
the future of Subversion and on our email lists."
Subversion 1.14.0-LTS is available now. The complete software source code can
be downloaded from https://subversion.apache.org/download.html, with a list of
install packages which are maintained by numerous third parties at
https://subversion.apache.org/packages.html.
Over its 20-year history, Subversion has grown to become the most popular
version control system on the market, and remains the leading centralized
versioning and revision control software today. Millions of users worldwide
depend on the collaboration-friendly system to easily access all files and
historical data simultaneously without code conflicts or corruption.
Apache Subversion is used for mission-critical code distribution and
collaboration workflow by Adobe Dreamweaver, Eclipse, Google, Halliburton,
Microsoft Visual Studio, Python, Ruby, Skype, SourceForge, and WordPress, among
many others. The ASF's infrastructure uses Apache Subversion across millions of
lines of code and nearly two million commits by more than 300 Apache projects.
Availability and Oversight
Apache Subversion software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is
overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A
Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations,
including community development and product releases. For downloads,
documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Subversion, visit
http://subversion.apache.org/
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350
leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most
popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as
"The Apache Way," more than 813 individual Members and 7,800 Committers across
six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available
enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of
software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community
actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and
ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The
ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations
and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Amazon Web
Services, Anonymous, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, CarGurus.
Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Inspur,
Leaseweb, Microsoft, Pineapple Fund, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union
Investment, Verizon Media, and Workday. For more information, visit
http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF
© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Subversion", "Apache Subversion",
and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software
Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and
trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
# # #
NOTE: you are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the
[email protected] distribution list. To unsubscribe, send email from the
recipient account to [email protected] with the word
"Unsubscribe" in the subject line.
