## Subversion Propaganda

Here are Subversion testimonials, and a list of prominent projects using Subversion. If you're trying to persuade your organization to try Subversion, this page might help you.

### Open Source Projects using Subversion

- ASF: the Apache Software Foundation.

  Project site: http://www.apache.org
  Repository: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/
  "The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community of open-source software projects."

- Samba: SMB services for *nix systems.

  Project site: http://www.samba.org
  Repository: http://websvn.samba.org/
  "Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients."

- Zope: web application server/framework.

  Project site: http://www.zope.org
  Repository: http://svn.zope.org/
  "Zope is an open source application server for building content managements, intranets, portals, and custom applications."

- Xiph: open-source multimedia protocols.

  Project site: http://www.xiph.org
  Repository: http://svn.xiph.org/
  "Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit corporation dedicated to protecting the foundations of Internet multimedia from control by private interests. Our purpose is to support and develop free, open protocols and software to serve the public, developer and business markets."

- Debian: a popular Linux distribution.

  Project site: http://www.debian.org
  Repository: http://svn.debian.org/
  "Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. [...] Debian uses the Linux kernel (the core of an operating system), but most of the basic OS tools come from the GNU project; hence the name GNU/Linux."

- Conectiva: a South American Linux distribution.

  Project site: http://www.conectiva.com.br
  Repository: https://moin.conectiva.com.br/RepositorySystem
  "A Conectiva, maior empresa em serviços Linux na América Latina, oferece uma linha de produtos e serviços que atende com eficácia os usuários domésticos, pequenas e médias empresas, grandes corporações e órgãos governamentais."

- Trac: a project management system.

  Project site: http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/
  Repository: http://svn.edgewall.com/repos/trac/
  "Trac is a minimalistic web-based software project management and bug/issue tracking system. It provides an interface to revision control systems (Subversion), an integrated Wiki and convenient report facilities."

- GNU Enterprise: enterprise application development.

  Project site: http://www.gnuenterprise.org
  Repository: http://www.gnuenterprise.org/developers/svn.php
  "GNU Enterprise (GNUe) is a meta-project which is part of the overall GNU Project. GNUe's goal is to develop enterprise-class data-aware applications as Free software. "

### Sites that Offer Subversion Hosting

- berlios.de: free hosting for open-source projects.

  Project site: http://www.berlios.de
  "The goal of BerliOS is to provide support for different interest groups in the area of Open Source Software (OSS). Our aim is to fulfil a neutral mediator function. The target groups of BerliOS are on one hand the developers and users of Open Source Software and on the other hand commercial manufacturers of OSS operating systems and applications as well as support companies."

- wush.net: commercial Subversion hosting.

  Project site: http://www.wush.net
  "Critical work can be lost if you are not archiving every revision of your source code and files. We provide fast, secure, and reliable source code management and revision control. Our hosting solutions are based on the open source package subversion, a modern replacement to cvs."

### Testimonials

- Post from Stuart Robertson of Absolute Systems, Inc `(5 May 2004)`

  I introduced SVN to Absolute Systems Inc. (www.absolutesys.com) where I work about a year ago, and for about 8 months we ran internal SVN pilots, played around to gain experience and trust, etc.

  In the last 4 months we have migrated all of our internal product source repositories from Visual Source-Safe to SVN using an internally-written VSS-to-SVN migration tool.

  Our largest SVN repository is now 3.7GB and currently has 68806 revisions. We are running SVN 1.0.1 + Apache 2.0.48 on Linux. ...

  SVN is a superb piece of work, and it is a *huge* step forward from VSS. To put things in perspective... previously we had 26 VSS databases for one product, primarily because of problems with VSS when the repositories grow large. As you can imagine, trying to manage product releases across so many repositories was really painful.

  Now, with SVN, *all* of the artifacts for that same product are in a single repository, meaning that with a few cheap copy operations all of the sources that make up a given release can be grouped together. ...

- Post from Gustavo Niemeyer of Conectiva Linux `(25 February 2004)`

  I'm sure you are aware about the fantastic product you people have built, but I'd like to tell you a little story which should give new users some comfort about it.

  Here in Conectiva we used to maintain our packages in a file based system, storing the latest SRPM packages, and also some old versions in case something bad happened. For a long time we wanted to build some system which would make our life easier in the daily work, and at the same time would give us some flexibility accessing historic information.

  Shortening the history a lot, 1 year and 6 months ago, the first revision was committed into our repository:

            % svn log https://svn.distro.conectiva/repos/cnc -r 1
            ------------------------------------------------------------------------
            r1 | niemeyer | 2002-08-27 17:12:04 -0300 (Tue, 27 Aug 2002) | 1 line

            Created basic structure.
            ------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Since then, 5 complete Conectiva Linux distributions were committed into the repository, and every single update in the distribution is done using Subversion. We've already surpassed 50000 revisions, in a 30GB repository. Even though we have had space, memory, and other kinds of problems around the repository, I'm proud to say we have never lost a single bit of information since then.

  Based on this, the least I could do is sending a big THANK YOU for everyone involved in the project.

- Testimonial from Martin Pittenauer of SubEthaEdit (http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/)
  Private communication.
  `(2 June 2004)`

  We are using Subversion since version 0.17 and it never let us down. On contrary it provided a much better experience than any versioning system we have used before, including CVS and perforce. With Apple adding support for .svn files within NIBs with Xcode 1.2 we are certain that subversion is the ideal versioning platform for modern software development on Mac OS X.

  ``
- Posts on Fog Creek Software's QA board
  Responses to a "Joel on Software" column by Joel Sposky. Note that these responses are from readers, not from Joel Sposky himself. `(9 March 2004)`

  ... We're moving from CVSNT to Subversion this week. I beat the crap out of it, and it's just amazing source control. Every CVS weakness that I ever complained about is gone, and the "changeset" concept has resulted in significantly easier to understand commits, and much better performance updates. ...

  `(from Brad Wilson)`

  Happy subversion user here. ... I *love* that moves and renames are tracked correctly and update working copies sensibly. Atomic commits are one of those features where even if you don't really get it when you read it on the feature list, once you're used to having it you can't imagine life without it. ... `(from Ian Olsen)`

- From the Blog of Michael F. Collins, III
  `(27 February 2004)`

  I've probably used the vast majority of mainstream version control systems including CVS, SCCS, RCS, Perforce, PVCS, Rational ClearCase, Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, and others. While none of these are perfect, and Subversion, while feature-rich, isn't fully perfect, my brief use of Subversion has elevated it to the top of my list and has lead me to seriously consider dropping CVS in favor of Subversion for my personal projects. Of all of the modern batch of version control systems, I think that Perforce is great, but I think that Subversion is better, especially when used with TortoiseSVN. Subversion edges out Perforce because of the price (free) and it beats the pants off of ClearCase, basically because it works. I've had good and rocky times with open source software, but the group of people behind Subversion and TortoiseSVN have done an excellent job building a quality product and should be very proud of themselves. With version 1.0, I see Subversion becoming a major player and I think that within the next year we'll start to see a mass migration from CVS to Subversion. I also see (or at least hope) that the version control marketplace takes notice because Subversion will give them a run for their money. It's going to be harder to make the sale and justify spending thousands of dollars for a difficult-to-use version control system when there's a free and open source version control system that is plainly better than the commercial competition.

- Post from Sebastien Cevey `(28 February 2004)`

  ... I've been using Subversion for personal and team projects for a few years now. I never regretted it, except for the deep frustration I feel everytime I have to go back to CVS.

  I am glad to have introduced many people to this software, through projects, talks or a course on versionning systems. I haven't heard anybody disappointed by it, and this doesn't surprise me. ...

- Reader response to an OS news article `(21 April 2004)`
  I recently evaluated both subversion and arch and chose subversion for my company. Probably the number 1 reason was the subversion book-- arch is not documented as well as subversion. All I want a centralized repository where me and 2-3 other developers can collaborate. I don't want to push the envelope on version control-- the existing models work great for me and 99% of the open source projects out there. I don't need to create branches while on an air plane. I do need to easily move files around in my repository. Subversion it is!