SVN 1.3 VS 1.5 (latest)

Question

Our IT guy has installed SVN 1.3, the current version is 1.5.
We are migrating from CVS to SVN, so do I lose much by staying with 1.3?
I like to run CVS2SVN and move to SVN without the need of writing any scripts


Also: in CVS we have on project with multiple directories in there.
What is the best practice in SVN?
There is a nightly build that has to pull in stuff from different directory in the same CVS project in order to build the nightly build. So I have to have that in mind and I have to modify the script to check things out from different repositories.

Answer 1

The biggest missing feature is any kind of merge tracking. That was added in version 1.5. You can upgrade your client to 1.6, but if the server is 1.3 then this is not enabled.

Then you have lots of performance enhancements. The 1.3 server is probably going to be slower, especially for large binary files. You can pack the server file repository to save space in 1.6.

No relative svn:externals, which was added in 1.5. There's a new HTTP URI format so without setting up any kind of ViewVC you can see older versions just via mod_dav_svn.

There's no svnsync in 1.3, which may make creating backups harder.

If you also include client changes, then you would be missing partial checkout improvements, password caching in encrypted form, etc.

Plus all the bug fixes that have gone into the code since 1.3, which is now about 4 years old!

Answer 2

You can start with this Subversion version 1.3, however you will quickly run into the limitations. As rq mentioned, the merge tracking is such a feature as well as the relative externals. As you do not have merge tracking in CVS, you will start to miss it as soon as you are getting used to SVN, but not at the beginning. The relative externals are more needed, if you have different access protocols (http, https, svn, etc).

AS you may use CVS alias module: This is a feature NOT available in SVN, you may want to use externals to get a similar behaviour in SVN.

Also the upgrade from SVN 1.3 will be harder, as you have to upgrade apache to 2.2 and use some other more mature software modules. This is easier to setup in the beginning and not after a year on a working SVN-System.