Subversion

For over a decade, performing collaborative software development on the Internet has meant using CVS, the Concurrent Versioning System. Unfortunatly, CVS hasn't aged very well. Lucky for us, some of the maintainers of CVS decided that it was time to start over and the result is Subversion. There are many benefits that Subversion brings to the table:

Subversion works mostly like CVS. If you are comfortable with CVS, you'll be comfortable with Subversion in short order.
Directories and file renames are versioned. This is big. In CVS, you could only move a file by deleting it and adding it again. As well, directories weren't versioned at all. Subversion fixes both of these problems.
Subversion can figure out the difference between a text and binary file itself and is equally efficient with both types of files.
Subversion is network-centric and works over the WebDAV/DeltaV protocol. As an extra bonus, you can browse a Subversion repository live, just like ours.

In short, when we decided to put together this site, the advantages Subversion brings to the table were compelling enough to act.

Using Subversion

If you've never used Subversion before, the following list of resources should help you get started:

The Subversion Homepage
Version Control with Subversion, the new book from O'Reilly that is also available online.
Appendix A from the book which covers differences between Subversion and CVS.

You'll want to read this book -- at least skim the first few chapters -- before diving in too far so that you understand what's going on.

Getting Subversion

There are two different ways to get Subversion onto your machine. You can build it from source (easy for some, hard for others) or you can grab pre-built packages for your system.

Subversion downloads

Some links for system specific packages:

Mac OS X