Source control: Managed vs DIY solution

Are you thinking about starting to use Source control such as SVN or CVS for your company or work? Your first decision is SVN or CVS – let me help, SubVersion. Plenty of other people discuss why, so go find their articles. But should you do it yourself? Or should you go find someone to […]
Last updated: March 11, 2012

Are you thinking about starting to use Source control such as SVN or CVS for your company or work? Your first decision is SVN or CVS – let me help, SubVersion. Plenty of other people discuss why, so go find their articles. But should you do it yourself? Or should you go find someone to help? Here are some thoughts:

For Hosted:

  • Done somewhere else, offsite
  • They manage backups
  • You arent responsible for the hardware
  • You dont have to worry about upgrades to SVN / Apache etc
  • most provide a project management tool
  • most provide a ticketing system

DIY:

  • Costs are only time to set up and maintain
  • Post Commit hooks can be set up in all sorts of intricate fashions
  • API’s such as www.svnkit.com can be used to programatically manipulate Source Control
  • Custom set ups with ticketing (could be a bad thing, adds more administrative time)

Am I biased? Maybe, but having worked with both sides of this equation I can most certainly say that the managed option has certainly been better to me. We have used CVSDude and simply, it just works. They also provide SVN Browsers, Bugzilla and Trac as part of their offerings. There are plenty of others out there: Wush.net Source Hosting Dev Guard Hosted Projects SVN Repository

Duncan Isaksen-Loxton

Educated as a web developer, with over 20 years of internet based work and experience, Duncan is a Google Workspace Certified Collaboration Engineer and a WordPress expert.
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