Subversion 1.5.0 Release

Its been a busy few days for software releases. First up is Subversion 1.5.0. This is a major new release of the VCS that is rapidly becoming the most widely used system whether open source of commercial. This release contains a bundle of improvements but the most visible will be the introduction of merge tracking. Merge tracking means Subversion can record what changes have been merged into where. This makes it much less costly to maintain branches and makes it possible to review what changes are available for merging from a particular branch. This feature will be important in many organisations using Subversion, as they can now take a more pro-active branching strategy - previously, the best practice with Subversion was surely to branch as little as possible - in fact, only, when there was no other alternative.

Other interesting features are support for sparse checkouts (e.g. check out directory Y, and only two levels of subdirectory beneath), grouping of files into changelists for convenience with the Subversion commandline.

Two features will be of interest to teams distributed over large organisations and multiple geographical locations. WebDAV transparent write-through proxy builds on functionality introduced with the 'svnsync' tool in 1.4.x to allow the deployment of read only front end proxy repositories. These proxies hold a full copy of the remote repository. When such a proxy receives a write request (commits) these are forwarded directly and transparently to the master server. Subversion 1.5.0 also includes preliminary support for merging from foreign repositories. This is an interesting development which I think we are going to see more of, as the Subversion developers mull the impact and increasing adoption of distributed version management tools.

In all Subversion 1.5.0 includes more than 150 bug fixes and enhancements. The source release is available as ever from Tigris.org. Binaries are now being certified by CollabNet, which seems to represent a clearer association of the project and its major sponsor. There are new releases of TortoiseSVN and SubClipse. VisualSVN is also a new commercial tool touting Visual Studio integration, and with a free server build that provides a nice Windows management GUI and Windows domain integration.

This is an important release for Subversion, representing a evolution in its maturity which will no doubt address many of the drawbacks its contractors have used in recent years.