[Zope] [OT] Subversion and TortoiseSVN on Windows

[Max M]

I know that this is quite a bit off-topic, but I just thought I would 
share some experiences with Subversion. It is probably most interresting 
for other Zope developers on Windows.

I am not in any way related to the Subversion project!

I have developed products for Zope/Plone for a long time. It has mosty 
been custom products for different customers without too much overlap.

But lately it has become easier to repurpose modules, mostly due to 
CMF/Plone frameworks and the common stylesheets etc.

Copying products from one INSTANCE_HOME to another started to become a 
frail process. I needed to remember to manually copy back from one 
INSTANCE_HOME to the first when I made updates to shared products. And 
didn't I also update the same file because of another bug I found in a 
third INSTANCE_HOME?

Off course I know CVS, and I knew that this was a good job for it. But I 
am mostly working on Windows, and as far as I know CVS runs poorly on 
Windows. To quote from http://www.cvshome.org/dev/codewindow.html:

"""
The second way is known as "local" or "non-client/server" CVS. This lets 
you run CVS if you have only Windows machines. However, due to issues 
(a) with local CVS on Windows, and (b) with the suitability of Windows 
as a server operating system in general, we would generally recommend 
this more to try out CVS and get a feel for it rather than for 
production use.
"""

I use Linux on some servers, but for various reasons I am more 
interrested in setting up the Versioning server on my Windows workstation.

I remembered trying to install CVS on Windows in the past without 
succes, and I also remembered Subversion being mentioned on /. a few times.

So I looked around and found Subversion at http://subversion.tigris.org/:

"""
Subversion is meant to be a better CVS, so it has most of CVS's 
features. Generally, Subversion's interface to a particular feature is 
similar to CVS's, except where there's a compelling reason to do otherwise.
"""

So I thought I would give it a go. It also has Python bindings, and I 
mean, anything with Python bindings is great as we know.

It installed on Windows without a problem, and there is a nice client 
for it: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ that integrates with the windows 
explorer.

So for a while I have been using it to keep version controll on my 
Zope/Python/Plone projects, and it works like a charm. It even feels 
like a Windows product.

It took me around a days work to get up and running from scratch with my 
most important software put under versioning controll.



regards Max M