I have just pushed the bits for the CollabNet Subversion Edge 1.0.1 release to the package repository. Those of you that have installed Subversion Edge should be able to see these updates now and install them. Click on the Administration tab and then Software Updates and ask it to check for updates. Your system will also do this automatically at midnight and then notify you of the updates when you login. These are the first live updates we have pushed out so it would be great to receive feedback about how the process works for you. We use the feature internally to receive each development build, but it is always good to hear how the feature works in the wild.

Today I am pleased to be able to take the covers off an exciting new product we have been working on at CollabNet for a while now -- CollabNet Subversion Edge.

Subversion Edge provides built in UI and support for configuring Apache to use LDAP and SSL, two very common Apache server features that users want to use, in addition to excellent log management capabilities. All log files are rotated daily and you can configure the number of days to keep log files as well as view all log files from the web UI. A common problem with inexperienced server administrators is to not deal with the ever-growing log files that are created by server applications. With Subversion Edge, this problem is solved.

Subversion Edge also configures and activates the little-known Subversion operational logging feature. This feature creates a separate log file for all of your high-level Subversion operations (checkout, diff, status, commit etc.), which can be useful for monitoring Subversion usage in your organization.

These are just a sampling of the great features you will find in Subversion Edge. There are many more features in the product and more to come over time. We really considered the powerful built-in updates as the initial release defining feature, as it enables us to deliver a steady stream of new features, as well as the regular stream of Subversion and Apache new releases and updates as they become available.

I know you are probably checking the limit on your corporate credit card right now, but put it away. Subversion Edge is not only free for unlimited usage, but it is also available as open-source under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3). We are in flight on the Subversion Edge 1.1 GA release and therefore we are still in the process of transitioning the project from our internal CollabNet TeamForge instance to the public instance on openCollabNet. The project home page for Subversion Edge is available now on openCollabNet. It contains the source code snapshot for the 1.0 release as well as a Wiki with information on the product. We will be turning on the tracker and other TeamForge features soon as we complete the move of the project and update the build infrastructure to remove internal network dependencies.

This is an exciting product that should make the lives of Subversion users a lot easier. I hope you will try the product and share your experience with us as well as join the openCollabNet community where you can help drive the roadmap and future for this product as well as Subversion itself.

I've just arrived in Berlin for elego's Subversion Day conference and associated hackathon. I'll be giving the keynote talk on Friday morning, where I'll share a little bit about the recently adopted updated Subversion vision statement and roadmap. If you're in the area, consider attending the conference and meeting a bunch of Subversion's developers!

I'm hosting a "scheduled chat" on Subversion at CollabNet's virtual "Agile ALM for Distributed Development" conference tomorrow, April 15, at 7:30am PDT. So, if you're available and online tomorrow around that time, and you'd to chat live with me about Subversion, then do the following:

1. Register for the conference.
2. Login at the appropriate time to the conference using the instructions you receive from the registration process.
3. Once logged in, visit the "Communication Center".
4. Click the "Scheduled Chats" item.
5. Click the "Subversion for the Enterprise" chat item. (It will only become a live link at the time of the session.)

This is a free-form chat with no agenda, so come with your questions. See you there!

It's done. I've finally submitted the Subversion vision and roadmap proposal resulting from the Subversion Vision Conference last week to the Subversion developer community for digestion and debate. The proposal is the result of many hours spent crawling through my notes from the conference, browsing photos I snapped of our whiteboard scribblings there, distilling all that information into organized thoughts, composing drafts of the proposal, and then editing it to death. (Many thanks to Hyrum Wright, who collaborated with me on the manifesto proposal and provided invaluable editorial review.)

You can read the full text of the proposal (and follow any subsequent discussion which may occur) in the development list archives at http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2010-04/0047.shtml. I'll highlight some of the key suggestions here, though.

The first order of business was to define Subversion's target market, and some of the key benefits that Subversion can offer to that market. My proposed project/product vision sums it up quite nicely (if I do say so myself):

Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations.

With that vision in mind, we are empowered to start talking in generalities about feature roadmaps and trends. Here's what is proposed:

• 1.7: WC-NG; HTTPv2; 'svn patch'; typical slew of various bug fixes
• 1.8: repository-dictated configuration; tree conflicts improvements; WC-NG-enabled stuff (rename tracking, compressed pristines, shelving/checkpointing, ...)
• 1.9: Editor v2 (for server->client rename handling improvements)
• …
• 2.0: FS-NG (ideally a parallelized task), with some (to-be-identified) FS-NG enabled features.

An admitted shortcoming of this roadmap is its lack of associated release dates. Realistically speaking, I think the myth of returning to six-month release cycles in Subversion has been dispelled by experience. The relatively easy work we were doing years ago is all done, leaving only the challenging stuff. I suspect this means we'll have roughly 9-15 month release cycles, at least until more of the larger plumbing-type tasks are completed. That said, we'll be trying to identify in our public roadmap not just what we're doing, but what we wish we could do if we had more manpower.

That brings me to the topic of communication. The proposal speaks about our community's need to do a better job of communicating with our target audience. Many of you already benefit — and have been benefitting for nearly a decade — from "getting the inside scoop" on Subversion via your relationship with CollabNet. That channel is certainly not going away (and if anything, I suspect you'll find it being enhanced). But this doesn't excuse the developer community from being a bit more transparent about its efforts via our recently redesigned project website. Overall, my hope is that enhanced lines and media of communication between Subversion's developers and its vast user base will be mutually beneficial, and that Subversion consumers with money and developer hours to spend will be encouraged, enlightened, and empowered enough to apply those resources towards the acceleration of Subversion's roadmap.

For those of you following the exciting saga of the Subversion Vision Conference, you'll know that today's half-day meeting was the last segment of this event. As such — and under pressure to make the best use of the time we had remaining — my fellow participants and I opted to bail out of our scheduled initial task of wordsmithing a vision statement and instead look at roadmap construction. After all, we'd agreed already on the basic assertions from which the vision statement itself would be crafted, so to get hung up on grammar was not in our best collective interest (nor yours).

Unfortunately for you, the reader, I'd rather not share just yet exactly what we came up with. It's not that I don't think you'd like it. It's just that the roadmap is not a settled matter in the Subversion development community just yet. Instead, I'll devote that creative energy into the proposal that the five attendees will be putting in front of the rest of our developer peers for general acceptance. Of course, once the community has consensed upon a plan, I'm more than happy to share it with the world.

I will, however, share with you what I consider to be a very important outcome of this meeting. I requested a pause near the end of our proceedings today to have a quick sound-off of the attendees regarding the question, "Has this meeting been beneficial to you (and your organization)?" (This was the natural complement of my Wednesday survey regarding what each of us hoped to get out the meetings.) I'm happy to report that the answer was a unanimous "Yes!" The five us are pleased with the results of the exercise undertaken and with the immediate value received from undertaking it.

Along those lines, I especially enjoyed one of our sidebars today regarding community interest and how to better communicate outward to users not inclined to join our project mailing lists. As a direct result of that conversation, I hope to soon see the subversion.org domain name find a new purpose: to serve as an aggregation location for various blogs and information streams related to Subversion and the greater Subversion ecosystem.

As I reflect now on the past half-week's discussions with the benefit of some hours and several hundred miles of travel behind me — oh, yes, it's always good to be home again! — mine is a positive take; resulting from that is a positive outlook on Subversion's future. The project has every bit as much opportunity to attract new users as it ever did, every bit as much opportunity to provide a better experience for its current users as it ever did, and now a much better likelihood of actually accomplishing both of those goals in a finite period of time. Long live Subversion!

As I predicted in yesterday's blog post, today was a very full and productive day at the Subversion Vision Conference. We convened at roughly 9am — this time with all five of the expected attendees — and for the next ten hours (minus lunch), it was all Subversion chatter.

After briefing Stefan and Karl on the events of yesterday, we really started to work on refining what we will eventually propose as the new vision statement and associated business-card-sized slogan for Subversion. Now, admittedly, a slogan seems a bit like a superficial bit of marketing, but a simple statement of purpose can go a long way towards keeping a project on track. The project's original slogan — "A compelling replacement for CVS" — was instrumental in focusing our development energies in the early days of the project on what needed to be done not to unseat ClearCase or Perforce or RandomVersionControlSystem, but to specifically replace CVS as the de facto standard for open source version control. It's that kind of focus that we hope to gain from a new simple slogan constructed from a meatier vision statement.

Crafting a vision statement and slogan sounds simple, but in reality this exploration led us into a pretty detailed discussion about Subversion's future target audience. Obviously, Subversion has enjoyed widespread success and acceptance by nearly every class of possible user in the past six years. But the version control landscape is different now than it was then, and it's not sufficient to be merely "good enough" for most folks — especially when a whole class of them have "even better for my needs" at their disposal in the newer distributed family of VC offerings. Subversion's foothold is in the enterprise, where centralization and control are (and will likely remain) highly valued.

With that in mind, we arrived at a very broad criteria for determining how Subversion could meet the needs of the enterprise without particularly alienating other classes of users:

• Maintain a centralized approach to version control.
• Continue to be simple enough for everyone to use, techie or otherwise. In fact, become even easier to use.
• Reward those who can afford to devote cycles towards detailed administration of the tool.
• Serve as a legitimate basis for an overall Software Configuration Management (SCM) solution.

We revisited the feedback harvested recently from enterprise users of Subversion to see how their requests supported the established goals. This again provided an opportunity for several brief "dips" out of the higher-level metadiscussion and into some technical details from time to time. Many of these technical sidebars led to the all-too-common place of feeling limited by Subversion's repository storage layer. Fortunately, Jon Trowbridge returned in the afternoon to share with us observations of that layer based on his experiences with writing a brand new Subversion repository backend from scratch for Google Code. Jon's a wonderful guy with a lovely sense of humor and a special knack for making you feel good even as he beats you up for poor technical decisions. I think we all learned a great deal about what kinds of things to avoid if we find ourselves seriously considering a new open source backend for Subversion repositories.

Other sidebar discussions occurred throughout the day, covering all sorts of technical and non-technical topics. We concluded by identifying the agenda for tomorrow's half-day of discussion, when we'll take up the task of developing a roadmap for Subversion over the next five years. It's possible that we won't have time to complete that discussion before going our separate ways again, but the time spent working together on the supporting materials for that process is time well-spent regardless.

Until tomorrow….