KDE's Switch to Subversion Complete

The conversion of KDE's source repository from CVS to Subversion is now complete. All KDE developers with CVS accounts now have Subversion accounts. To find out how to use your new Subversion account read the Using Subversion with KDE tutorial. To checkout anonymously use svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/ as the base of your Subversion repository URL. You can browse the repository through the web at http://websvn.kde.org/.

This is the largest ever change from CVS to Subversion. The conversion script ran for a total of 38 hours from start to completion. Congratulation to Stephan Kulow, Oswald Buddenhagen and the other system administrators for the successful change.

KDE's family of websites are now managed and updated from the Subversion archive. The CVS archive itself still exists in read-only mode. Every developer now needs to do a fresh checkout of their KDE sources. While the server is still operating under heavy load you may wish to start with these pre-checked-out archives of trunk/HEAD rather than checking out directly from Subversion.

Subversion offers many advantages over CVS while remaining similar enough to use that it should be easy for existing users to learn. Changes are now made with a single revision number per-commit rather than per-file. It also offers the ability to move files & directories and makes it easier to work with branches.

Stephan's People Behind KDE interview includes some history of KDE's CVS. The first ever CVS commit was the import of kdelibs by Stephan on 13 April 1997 (Subversion revision number 2). The last active commit to CVS was an update to the maps on KDE Worldwide (Subversion revision number 409201). The first of many commits to Subversion was to the kde-build script.

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Comments

by Anonymous (not verified)

Those are missing some files (it's being worked on to re-add them) so better don't use Subversion now for anything but trunk/.

by Anonymous (not verified)

branches/KDE/3.4/ works again, tags/ is still broken.

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

If see in trunk/KDE/kde-i18n structures like
trunk/KDE/kde-i18n/de/messages/kdeextragear-3/
But in svn kdeextragear-3 is not anymore, digikam stable is e.g. in
trunk/extragear/graphics/
Will i18n be redesigned?

Bye

Thorsten

by Anonymous (not verified)

There will be several stuff (eg kdenonbeta, www) moved once everything is running fine.

by Ryan (not verified)

Clicking View and Diff to previous doesn't seem to work at websvn.kde.org.

by Anonymous (not verified)

It was said in the kde-cvs-announce mail which announced websvn.kde.org that this doesn't work yet and will be worked on.

by Ryan (not verified)

I should have read my email more closely. ;)

by Anonymous (not verified)

This seems to be working now.

by Kenneth (not verified)

Does this mean that there will be a graphical KDE front end to SVN, perhaps as a plugin to Konqueror? I'm thinking something similar to the TortoiseSVN plugin to Windows Explorer. =)

by AnonymousCoward (not verified)

You must mean like Cervisia

by uga (not verified)

It's not quite the same thing. Cervisia is fine, but tortoise got very clear differences if you ever used it. Cervisia's kpart for example won't work on normal non-cvs folders (it won't display your files), the gui in cervisia doesn't match that of the normal file browser (it's a reimplementation, rather than an extension), etc... Tortoise is more integrated on the file browser than cervisia is, which is more like a separate application.

by uga (not verified)

Of course I got nothing against Cervisia. It's pretty nice application. Just pointing out they're different things

by ac (not verified)

The most logical place to look for something like this is of course kde-apps.org. There you would have found KSvn (http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=23411).

by anaon (not verified)

A pretty good one is eSvn, a Qt-Frontend.

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

Does anyone think that these instructions:

http://developer.kde.org/source/anonsvn.html

could use a little more work?

by Anonymous (not verified)

Where's your diff? And don't forget the other places on developer.kde.org.

by Morty (not verified)

Looks like a bad attempt to replace the letters cvs with svn:-) Does it actually work with those instructions, replacing the remaining cvs references?

Is the Anonymous SVN operational at all yet?

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

Yes the second commnd (using "svn") is running now:

svn checkout svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdelibs

and appears to be working.

Note that aRts is a different place, so the command is:

svn checkout svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/arts

by Morty (not verified)

Great, going to try it out in a few days. Going to use some time doing some spring cleaning on my HD first, besides I don't mind waiting for the traffic on svn server to decrease some.

by anonymous (not verified)

;-)

by Anonymous (not verified)

How about KDE 3.4.1 and a Qt4 release which doesn't change its API anymore first?

by Nicolas Goutte (not verified)

As the API of Qt changes from Qt3 to Qt4, the first KDE for Qt4 will have a changed API, so or so. So probably it is better to do the full way and make all necessary changes for KDE 4.

Have a nice day!

by Anonymous (not verified)

You didn't understand: you don't want to port KDE to a moving target. Qt 4 Beta 2 was said to be the end of (incompatible) API changes but it seems that Trolltech is still making changes (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/1005).

by Richard (not verified)

The conversion lasted for 38 hours, but what system performed the job?
How GHz and GB does the conversion system have?

by Andy (not verified)

I've seen a 2TB CVS archive converted to sv and it took almost 20 hour using a dual usparc2 and 8gb ram, so i guess 38h is pretty good, considered kde consists of many small commits.

by Thiago Macieira (not verified)

The admins aren't at liberty to say what the specs were, but here's some food for thought:

First they said it would take a whole week to convert. Then they got this new machine that could do the job in 12 hours (and actually took 38h).

On one post to kde-core-devel, Coolo posted an image of an icecream network chart that included this machine. It was represented by a big purple blob, much larger than anything else in the chart.

And finally, I am positively sure it isn't anything x86. The thing had more RAM than x86 can possibly address (1TB, if I remember correctly).

By the way, our archive is now 15GB in Subversion.

by Nick (not verified)

and what is the version of svn - 1.2 or 1.1?

by Anonymous (not verified)

Subversion 1.2 is not even released!

by oGALAXYo (not verified)

I've put up my very personal KDE SVN trunk buildscripts (changed from CVS). In case someone is interested feel free to grab and test them that's how I use to build my kde here:

http://www.akcaagac.com/tools/files/shell/getkde.sh
http://www.akcaagac.com/tools/files/shell/kdemake.sh

by Mario (not verified)

Gentoo ebuilds available at: http://csua.berkeley.edu/~mtanev/kde-svn.html

by brian (not verified)

Would the architects of the conversion mind writing a short article on how they went about getting ready for such a conversion, and possibly tell us about some of the gotchas that came up? Your experiences could be of significant value to other large (or small) projects thinking about making the move to subversion.

If such a document already exists, could someone point me in the proper direction?

Thanks.

by David House (not verified)

This is good news. I'm much more fluent with SVN than with CVS, and I've always been a fan of the alternate version control system :)