Subversion too old

Subversion is perfectly integrated in Netbeans and if you have a running Subversion server or subscribe to Sourceforge project it is matter of minutes before you can commit, update, merge and diff-it. Aside that combination you can use Tortoise SVN which embed itself into Windows Explorer.

But due to some structural changes between 1.4 and 1.5 you cant mix projects from 2 machines with different client versions. It seems I imported with client 1.4.6.28521and used 1.5.3.32289 on another PC to commit changes, afterward it did not work on the first PC anymore. Just popping the error “subversion client too old…”.

I am not sure how to handle that, beside ensuring all clients run the same version. My workaround: provided your sources on the server are most actual one, trow away your local copy (make a backup first) and checkout again.
You find some info/problem description here (link).

Subversion Server on tigris.org (link)
Subversion Client on collab.net (link)
Tortoise SVN Client on tigris.org (link)

Update 2008-10-31
Netbeans Users:You can use any svn cmdline client. There is no need to go for the older “Netbeans” version. Download the latest at collab.net (link)

SCM – Sourcecode Management

In the beginning there was one developer and it was fine. Then someone decided to add a second developer to give the first one companionship and it was chaos.
I think every developer run at least once into the situation that someone else touched the same piece of sourcecode as he and faced the situation to merge the sourcecode. Sometimes possible and easy, sometimes impossible because 2 parties were working on the same module for months (for whatever reason causing this situation!). Lets ignore the organizational reason why more than 1 person does the same thing.

In the first company I ever worked in (15 years ago) we realized this is a problem and solved it manually by a simple homemade tool that locked (write-protect) certain source files on shared drive. Later we bought another 3rd party tool to do this job and finally we moved on to MS Sourcesafe in the late 90’s. It worked very well because we were only 3..5 developer sitting in the same physical location.

The next company I joined did the same, but bought a very expensive piece of SCM which did the same job for a considerable alrge number of developer at different sites. What happened ? The system was not very stable, at least from the moment we had no more fulltime admin, lot of downtimes happened and developer were not able to synch or commit changes. Individuals started to remove the write protection on their local sourcefiles and within of weeks there were numerous branches of sourcecode. And it was chaos.

Finally I decided to start development again and learn from previous mistakes. For SCM you have a selection of commercial and opensource products. To name 3 of them: CVS (link), Subversion (link) and Bazaar (link). You can download them and install them on your server (and potentially run into the trouble of administrating both hardware and software!). I came to the conclusion to buy this is a service from a reliable provider.

You might want to checkout this company (link)

I use their team subversion package. Subversion is integrated into Netbeans (link) and can be used with Windows Explorer with Tortoise as plugin (link).