TortioseSVN or TortioseCVS (SVN or CVS)

Kieran asks “TortioseSVN or TortioseCVS”

Its an interesting question. I’ve actually got both tools installed on my laptop because I need to work with both source code control tools. Recently I started using Subversion to manage the versioning on the files in the My Documents directory and have found it to be quite robust.

The nice thing about Subversion is that through tools like TortoiseSVN you are able to move files and rename directories whilst still maintaining version history. When you couple this with the ability to perform atomic commits (if one commit fails they all fail) means that you will probably get a more robost experience with SVN over CVS. If you go for SVN you are probably going to need to set up an Apache box to host the underlying WebDAV infrastructure on (its still WebDAV isn’t it?).

CVS however does have a huge install base, and if you contribute to open source projects that are housed on SourceForge then you are going to need a CVS client, and as far as I am concerned TortoiseCVS is it. In addition to the large install base the number of tools that exist which integrate with it WELL are staggering.

If you are a Microsoft-oriented developer however you should probably be seriously considering Visual Studio Team System and the source code control system that is embedded into the Team Foundation Server component. The pricing isn’t quite clear at the moment (more on this later), but its a compelling package because it integrates things like issue tracking, source code control and continuous integration into one package.