Many of you know Brian Behlendorf. Brian is the co-founder of the Apache project and also the co-founder of CollabNet. He founded our company in 1999 together with Tim O’Reilly and our current CEO, Bill Portelli. It was Brian who realized that CollabNet needed something more robust than CVS for its globally distributed development platform and he took the initiative to start a new open source version control project. Early 2000, CollabNet contacted Karl Fogel, the author of "Open Source Development with CVS" and asked if he'd like to work on this project. Coincidently, Karl was already discussing a design for a new version control system with his friend Jim Blandy, who had come up with a name: Subversion. The rest is history and well-known; so why am I writing this?

Brian is one of the most influential open source advocates and he is currently participating in the World Economic Forum in Davos (for the second time actually). Brian is still with CollabNet, as a board member, and he writes a daily dispatch from Davos for our web site. Since many of you know Brian, I wanted to invite you to his writings from Switzerland; it’s a great read and you get direct insights into this highly important event

http://www.collab.net/news/articles/davos.html

A few weeks back I asked in this blog that readers nominate (and later vote for) Subversion in the developer.com product of the year award. Big thanks to everybody who followed up: Subversion won the "Developer.com Product of the Year 2008" award in the "Open Source Tool" category.

Here is a comment that one of the people who voted for Subversion made: “Ease of use, the ability to support distributed teams without any administration headaches, and enterprise-class scalability have made Subversion the preferred solution for many distributed projects.”

Well, I can certainly agree with that. Subversion continues to prove its strengths as the software configuration management solution of choice for teams of many sizes, and specially those that are distributed over different locations. At CollabNet we see daily how users of Subversion successfully manage SCM for their distributed teams, whether they use Subversion stand-alone or as part of one of our enterprise platforms, such as SourceForge Enterprise Edition.

Congratulations to the open source development team and everybody involved with Subversion.

Sometimes finding open source software for AIX can be a pain. Finding binaries is hard enough, and then they might be out of date. Subversion binaries for AIX have suffered this fate until now and I am proud to announce the availability of Subversion 1.4.6 AIX binaries, a free download from openCollabNet.

These new AIX binaries are a complete Subversion 1.4.6 installation. The server includes support for all repository data stores and all repository access layers. The binaries even ship with Apache 2.2.x modules and the Python language bindings.

You'll notice the binaries do not include the Java, Perl or Ruby bindings. Due to the complexity of building these, we've decided not to ship them in our initial release. The AIX binaries are currently maintained as a community effort, so feel free to join the effort to make the download more complete. If you are interested, visit the AIX section of the SVNbinaries project on openCollabNet. The SVNbinaries project is also where you can find more information on the AIX binaries, like the build instructions and the README. Lastly, the SVNbinaries project is where you can submit feedback and requests, and even get community support.

Just as we were heading out on our break for the holidays, the Subversion team issued a maintenance release for 1.4. We have refreshed our CollabNet Subversion packaging to include this release and as of today you can download it for Linux and Solaris. Windows should be available later this week.

A list of fixes in the 1.4.6 release can be viewed here in the CHANGES file. Quite a number of bug fixes were made in the process of producing Subversion 1.5 and it was time to backport the more significant fixes and issue a new 1.4.x release.

If you have followed the packages CollabNet issued for the Subversion 1.5 merge tracking beta program, then you might already be aware that we have revamped our CollabNet Subversion packaging for Linux:

• The build now uses shared libraries. Previously we used a static build as we thought that would make it easier to support multiple Linux distros. It turns out that doing a shared library build works just as well (and is needed for the rest of what we are doing).
• We now have a new "extras" RPM that includes ViewVC, which is integrated into our server configuration script. When configuring a server with the "Extras" RPM installed (and using the Apache server option), you will get a simple Yes/No question asking if you want to have ViewVC installed.
• To support ViewVC, the Extras RPM includes the Subversion bindings for Python. This means you should be able to use hook scripts that require these bindings.
• The client RPM now includes the JavaHL bindings. We will take advantage of this when 1.5 is released and we release our GUI merge client.

We had planned on switching to this new packaging when Subversion 1.5 releases. However, since the shared library build process resolves some problems that users have had with our static builds, we decided to make these changes now.

The Solaris and Windows packaging remains the same for this release but will include similar changes when we release CollabNet Subversion 1.5.

Update January 8th: CollabNet Subversion 1.4.6 for Windows is now also posted in the downloads section.