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Re: SVN - CVS compatibility

From: Jack Repenning <jrepenning_at_collab.net>
Date: 2004-12-13 18:04:52 CET

On Dec 12, 2004, at 6:05 AM, Michael J. Pawlowsky wrote:

> Is there any compatibility between pnserver and subversion.
>
> Basically what I would like to know is, if I switch over from cvs to
> svn will I loose the ability to checkout documents directly from the
> different development environments that I work in. (ZDE, JCreator Pro
> etc.).
>
> I'm guessing I will, which is why I am hesitating on installing svn
> for myself, but would like to confirm this.

The compelling question here is, "has the *repository* been switched?"
If the administrator of the repository switches the repository storage
from CVS to SVN, then you have no choice, you must switch to using SVN.
  Conversely, if the repo admin has _not_ switched the repo storage,
then you still have no choice: you _must_ continue to use CVS. It's
perfectly possible to have CVS and SVN both installed on a client
(work) system, and to use whichever tool is appropriate for each
project, but you can't use either tool on a project repository that's
stored the other way.

Now, about that "perfectly possible" comment. It might be
somewhat-less-than-possible, if your particular IDE uses a
Windows-proprietary, obsolescent semi-standard called SCC, which thinks
there's only one versioning system (what SCC calls the "provider") at a
time. In that case, any given workstation is hard-wired to use only
one versioning system. I don't know whether any of the tools you
mention use SCC (the primary users, and the originators of the
interface, are older Microsoft tools, such as Visual Studio before
.NET).

Some non-Microsoft tools have leveraged the SCC interface. Some of
them provide fairly dynamic switching of the provider, basically
emulating the "provider-per-project" model which is more general and
common these days.

For the list: does the Win32 SVN installer switch the SCC provider?

If so, installing SVN (just like any other SCC provider) might cause
you to lose the SCC configuration to use CVS on the CVS projects ...
unless your particular IDE does the emulation trick.

If (a) you're using an SCC-based IDE, which (b) does not take care of
this for you, then (c) in order to mix VC systems, you'll have to use
some out-of-IDE tool, like TortoiseSVN (or TortoiseCVS, or WinCVS) to
work with whichever VC system is not configured as the "provider".

-==-
Jack Repenning
CollabNet, Inc.
8000 Marina Boulevard, Suite 600
Brisbane, California 94005
o: +1 650.228.2562
c: +1 408.835.8090

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Received on Mon Dec 13 18:07:33 2004

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