Subversion virtual file system

From: Grant Bowman (grantbow@svpal.org)
Date: Thu Apr 05 2001 - 07:29:41 PDT


I forgot where I posted about Subversion before, but it's a stated goal
of this project to replace the CVS version control system. They intend
to release version 1.0 by the end of the summer.

A quick summary includes diff-level granularity with versioning
(Subversion's primary aim) and security (provided by apache) written to
a virtual file system stored into a BerkeleyDB database unlike CVS.
An arbitrary number of name-value pairs can be used to "categorize"
each file.

The code for the API for their storage method is available via the web
at
http://subversion.tigris.org/source/browse/subversion/subversion/libsvn_fs/

Acrobat page number 41 of their design document gives a relatively current
schema for the "content" storage system. Perhaps with XPath and
XPointer extending Subversion an OHS storage system could be partially
implemented. Given a system that works at a diff-level, a logical step
(needed for an OHS) is an editor aware of the changes. I suspect this is
relatively simple from a technical back end point of view but some would
say an overly extreme imposition on the user.

Working forward, a good architectural diagram was shown at SV-LUG last
night outlining their front end. It consists of either a local library
connection or a WebDAV (over Apache) connection. A set of libraries
handles these cases. Front end libraries are the hook into both a
command line CVS-like client and a (planned) GUI client.

Cheers,

--
-- Grant Bowman                                   <grantbow@svpal.org>



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