Press Release
Subversion® Release 1.4 now available from Subversion Open Source Community
New release builds upon exponential user adoption of Subversion and brings significant performance improvements
BRISBANE, Calif., Sep 18, 2006 — The Subversion open source community announced the immediate availability of Subversion 1.4, the latest release of Subversion. Subversion is the next generation version control system that is rapidly replacing legacy systems and becoming a standard amongst the global developer community. Subversion is hosted on Tigris.org, an open source community focused on building better tools for collaborative software development.
Subversion is an open source version control system that is primarily used to manage and track changes to software source code but it can also be used with any kind of digital files. Subversion has been adopted by many open source communities as well as large software development organizations as a natural upgrade from CVS. The open source project was started in 2000 by CollabNet® with the goal to develop a versioning system with capabilities surpassing CVS and with improvements targeted at the growing number of programmers and system administrators challenged with integrating diverse development teams, distributed resources, and multi-component software.
“It's been great to be part of the 1.4 development team and bring new features to Subversion”, says David Anderson, Release Manager for the Subversion open source community. “The rapid adoption of Subversion is proof of the stability, security, and rapid advances of Subversion as an open source version control solution. With Subversion 1.4, it's never been easier to set up a code repository and for developers to collaborate with peers around the world.”
Release 1.4 is all about making Subversion faster, more efficient, and reducing resource consumption. These improvements touch Subversion at both ends, from the code repository on the server, to the working copies on the client. Specific improvements include:
- With release 1.4, the Subversion client is smarter about the way it manages and stores property metadata resulting in performance improvement when searching the working copy of the repository, detecting file modifications, and dealing with large files. With Subversion 1.4, the overall disk footprint for the Subversion client is also smaller.
- A new tool – svnsync – provides the ability to replicate history from one repository to another, allowing read-only mirrors to be created for busy or geographically-distant repositories.
- A new "auto-recovery" is now available when using Subversion 1.4 compiled against BerkeleyDB 4.4. If a Subversion server process crashes and leaves the repository in an inconsistent state, the new "auto-recovery" feature will notice the problem and automatically recover the repository. This new feature increases the reliability of BerkeleyDB-based Subversion repositories in the face of system and server crashes.
Developers are encouraged to visit the Subversion community web site, http://subversion.tigris.org to download the source code or binaries, view the Subversion 1.4 release notes and get access to many Subversion related tools such as TortoiseSVN, Subclipse – the Subversion plug-in for Eclipse – or cvs2svn which is a repository conversion tool. Testimonials and a list of open source projects that use Subversion are also available on the site.
To find out what's new in Subversion 1.4, developers can check out a free webcast available at http://www.collab.net/subversion. This webcast was produced by C. Michael Pilato, a Subversion committer and Senior Engineer at CollabNet. CollabNet also offers Subversion support, training and migration for enterprise customers.
About the Subversion Open Source Community
Subversion is an open source project that can be used to manage changes to any sort of information. Subversion has won numerous industry awards such as the 2005 Jolt Product Excellence Award, and the 2006 Developer.com Product of the Year finalist Award. It is rapidly becoming a standard for version control and for development teams that are geographically distributed. The Subversion open source community came together in 2000 when the need to build a better CVS became obvious.
Subversion is available under an Apache/BSD-style license which is fully compliant with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. It runs on all modern flavors of Unix, Win32, BeOS, OS/2, OS/400 and MacOS X. To date, it is estimated that Subversion has been installed on more than 45,000 public Apache servers with a user population of over 600,000 developers.
