Moving to Subversion

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org>]

Salam,

Now that we are successfully running on Apache2, I would like to fully
migrate from CVS to Subversion by the end of this week (so by Jan. 30,
2005).

The plan is to revamp the entire structure we have and to give each
project its own repository. What this means is that we would no longer
have 'projects/' and/or 'translate/', etc.

This is because Subversion uses atomic commits (unlike CVS), so each
revision is like a snapshot of the entire tree. This would look rather
awkward if we were to maintain the same method of lumping all projects
under one tree, etc.

The time-line given also factors in updating the CVS HOWTO document,
etc.

The syntax to SVN is almost identical to CVS (and aside from typing
'svn' instead of 'cvs') there really isn't much of a difference for the
basic operations.

Some of the benefits to the migration:
1. Making my job easier (deleting, removing, etc. files) -- you no
longer have to request them from me.
2. Those behind proxies can access it (integrates with Apache)
3. Better handling of binary files
4. Better bandwidth utilization (e.g. you would be sending a diff of a
file, not the entire file when doing a commit, etc.)

and last but not least
5. It can be localized to Arabic (so you can get those wonderful error
and warning messages in Arabic) ;)

Do let me know if there are any suggestions (or objections).

Regards,
Mohammed Elzubeir