Chapter 2. An Introduction to Subversion

In 1986, Dick Grune introduced the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) as the first version control system to support development of multiple files concurrently by multiple developers, using the merging paradigm to combine those developers' work together when they committed to the repository. From there, CVS went on to become immensely popular, especially among open source projects, where it is the nearly ubiquitous choice for version control. Despite its popularity, though, CVS has started to show its age, and suffers from many shortcomings that can make it difficult to use. So, in an attempt to overcome these shortcomings, the Subversion project was started in 2000, and in February of 2004 was released as version 1.0. Since that release, Subversion has increased rapidly in popularity, and appears to be poised to succeed at its goal of replacing CVS.