I love Subversion and have been using it as a source control system for some years now. I was catching up on some reading (mostly linked from Malcolm’s blog) and spotted an exciting thing coming up in Subversion — changelists.
When I’m coding I tend to end up working on multiple bugs and features at once, and it becomes a pain to work out which edited files correspond to which bug when I then come to check stuff in.
The source control system I used previously — Perforce — deals with this by allowing user-created changelists. These are user-created sets of files tagged with a checkin comment before they’re actually checked in. I often had 3–4 of these active at any one time, with checkin comments such as “Work on feature XX” or more commonly “TESTING — DO NOT CHECK IN”.
Thankfully, this feature is coming to Subversion in version 1.5, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m sure the guys on the TortoiseSVN project will do a spiffing UI to it too.
Matt Godbolt is a C++ developer living in Chicago. He works for Hudson River Trading on super fun but secret things. He is one half of the Two's Complement podcast. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.