I just started on a project that was using trac and subversion but they weren't integrated. I love the cross referncing trac provides. It can really help explain changesets and show how an issue was resolved.

The steps to add subversion to trac are

I've been using version control for a long time, but I haven't used CVS much since the first day I tried Subversion.

(Git seems great but isn't the same kind of drop-in upgrade that CVS to Subversion was)

Things I forgot

I recently finished work on a project that really suffered from a lack of build tools.

It was a large project, and while many of us were keen on writing tests we weren't able to get management sign of to spend some time automating the test process. So even though we did some of the work we didn't get all the benefits.

It was really frustrating to come back to a piece of work that was well covered by unit tests, only to find those tests broken 

I've been intrigued by git for a while, but as a long time user of svn I'm kinda cautious about moving on.

So today I had some time and used it to read up on the pros and cons, as well as try things out a bit.

It seems to me that git is clearly the better system; but that svn has the advantage of maturity.

Git in itself seems to have grown up, it's just that the supporting infrastructure and developer experience is still limited.

When you want to see what svn update is about to do you may try

svn update --dry-run

But this doesn't work.

You can get the results you need by running

svn status -u

Kdesvn and Kompare are two very nice tools providing rich GUI's for svn and file comparison respectively.

In order to show the difference between two revisions using Kompare, change the default external diff settings to:
kompare %1 %2

It's often handy to look at the changes made by a commit ignoring whitespace changes.

This is often required when a dveloper has made some formatting changes and you just want to see the functional differences.

svn diff --diff-cmd diff -x -uw


Version conflicts to be aware of

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) now ships with Subversion 1.5 

You can't use a svn 1.4 client and a svn 1.5 client on the same working copy.

While the subversion integration in Eclipse is great I still prefer to do some things on the command line and some with kdesvn.

Then you need to upgrade your subclipse plugin to subclipse 1.4

If you can - then upgrade to Eclipse 3.4 

Having just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 my key observation is that it's important to read the release notes first.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

There are a few bugs which have affected me

I just discovered a nifty little utility

Often working copies are only partially updated, this command gives a very quick command-line summary of the state of the working copy.

It's not as rich an output as kdesvn which will colour code all the updateable files, but its a standard part of svn so should always be available.

Name

svnversion — Summarize the local revision(s) of a working copy.