Change is the only thing that is constant in our world. Managing multiple versions of things (code, documents, etc.) is essential in today's technical environment. Because change is inevitable, version control tools (the ability to store and retrieve versions of things) are a necessary component of one's work bench.
In the open source world, CVS has been the prominent version control tool used by many community-based projects and within major corporations. Subversion is an open source version control system which improves upon many of CVS weaknesses. Many projects are migrating to Subversion to take advantage of Subversion's features. Here are some of Subversion's features:
Many users use Subversion's command line interface but for GUI-type people out there, several GUI-based Subversion clients exist. If you are a KDE user there is kdesvn. Here is a snapshot of kdesvn in action:
Another popular GUI client is rapidsvn which runs on Linux and Windows. Here is a snapshot of rapidsvn:
Subversion is easy to install and to use. If you need version control (who doesn't ;) then Subversion is a great tool for you.
A great online book on Subversion from O'Reilly is at: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/svn-book.html
The main site for Subversion is http://subversion.tigris.org/
Kdesvn can be installed using YaST or downloaded from: http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=26589
rapidsvn's homepage is: http://rapidsvn.tigris.org/
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