On Friday we refreshed the Subversion 1.5 pre-release binaries of the Merge Tracking Early Adopter Program. If you participate in this beta program, please update your binaries to this latest version. These binaries are built using revision 27527 from October 31st and include fixes to some of the bugs reported by participants of the Merge Tracking Early Adopter Program.

Please note: The latest Subversion client will update a working copy to the new 1.5 format when it writes to it. Once this happens, you can no longer use a 1.4 client on the same working copy. So, make sure you do not use the new client on a production working copy; use separate working copies for Subversion 1.5 testing.

If you are not testing Subversion 1.5 yet, you can start doing so today. The Subversion developers rely heavily on users to test new versions and the need for testing is now. Subversion 1.5 development is close to the point where the committers will branch the code to a release branch. The more testing we do now, the more stable the release candidate will be, which reduces the time the Subversion developers will soak the code.

Next to testing, another goal of the Merge Tracking Early Adopter program is to give you early access to Subversion 1.5 so you can prepare your organization. With merge tracking coming, many organizations will want to look at their branching policies and optimize to benefit more from parallel development on multiple branches. If you haven’t attended our webinars on this topic, you can view the replays:

• Branching and Merging Strategies for Subversion 1.5
• Advanced Merge Tracking & Branching with Subversion

To participate in the beta, go to the Merge Tracking Early Adopter Program on openCollabNet. Here’s what you can find there:

• Links to Subversion's merge tracking design documents.
• Subversion 1.5 pre-release binaries that include the new merge tracking features.
• A sample Subversion repository that includes merge tracking history.
• Previews of  CollabNet’s new GUI clients for Eclipse (merge management and change set merge).
• Extras: ViewVC and Python bindings.
• The svnmerge.py migration script (to migrate svnmerge.py merge history to SVN 1.5).
• A forum where you can discuss the pre-release software with Subversion committers from CollabNet and with others. Report bugs in this forum.

Join us, help the community ensure a rock-solid Subversion 1.5 release, get your organization ready and see what is coming for Eclipse integration.