Inspirational Designs: SVN
30 09 09 - 19:21 Subversion, or SVN, is a common tool used by computer scientists (and some professors) to manage different versions of documents.
The menu in TortoiseSVN, a graphical Subversion client.
SVN (and other version control software) are a robust way to manage multiple drafts of documents between users. It allows the users to "check in" and "check out" their files, resolve conflicts between drafts and back up their data. SVN tracks each version, allowing any user to revert a mistake back to a working version. SVN is commonly used to check code in and out of a repository, so it works best with plain text documents. Several of our users already use version control systems, such as SVN, CVS or Dropbox. We would like to incorporate the data sharing aspects of SVN, so our users can share their data easily. We would also like to keep the commenting aspects of SVN, allowing our users to track who made changes and when. However, we would not like to the use the complex, code-oriented model for SVN. SVN is not ideal for combining complex text documents (such as word). Additionally, because our users are not necessarily very technical, we would like to avoid a product that forces them to set up their own server (like SVN requires).