Re^2: (sort of OT) cvs/vendor supplied modules/our own modifications

[The Mad Hatter]

Subversion solves the complaints you listed, including keeping the history when deleting/renaming files. I made the switch from CVS to Subversion a little while back with the help of the online version of a great book, and I've really liked it a lot.

There shouldn't be a fee at all; subversion is licensed under the Apache 1.1 license (but with CollabNet as the copyright holder).

[dpavlin]

I switched to subversion a while ago just for ease of branching and merging. But, I also needed compatibility with CVS-based hosting services (like SourceForge), so I wrote svn2cvs. With cvs2svn and this tool I made successfull transition to subversion.

Vendor branches in subversion are just directories. Basic principle is following: You have version 1.0 of vendor (upstream) branch. You do copy (which is cheap in subversion) to your trunk (current working tree). When vendor release version 1.1, you do merge. Subversion will diff vendor version 1.0 and 1.1 and apply changes to your working tree. If there are conflicts, you will get original file, left and right merge, just to make it easier. All that is described in much more details in subversion book.

I must also warn you: if you try subversion branches, you won't be able to go back to CVS :-)