A few weeks ago, I jumped on to investigate into different revision control systems. In general, there are two different approaches for revision control: The distributed systems and the centralized ones. But what are the differences? What are the current problems with CVS one is confronted with when dealing with OOo code? What fits best into the OOo development process?

The main difference between distributed and centralized solutions is the way they host the underlying code repository. Where the distributed one enables users to easily host their own repository on their own machine or within their own infrastructure and therefor supports some kind of disconnected development, the centralized one needs a online connection to the central repository for every kind of interaction (commits, checkout, ...). From that point of view, a distributed revision control systems seems to fit great into the OOo development processes, especially as developers and contributors are spread all over the world.

But this is not the only aspect. When taking a look to the current hurdles dealing with OOo code, one would find out, that the processes (especially the Child Workspace Process) relays heavily on creation of branches and on tagging. And branching and tagging of huge source trees is a nightmare with CVS (which is the current centralized solution of OOo). It takes ages to create a branch to work on and ages to execute updates, checkouts, commits. Are these problems solved by usage of a distributed system? Maybe. But its for sure, that these problems will be solved with a actual implementation of a centralized revision control system: Subversion.

What else when thinking about a successor of CVS?

On OOo, we have implemented a lot of useful processes and tools around Collab.net's infrastructure ( CEE). Some of these are the Environment Information System, the Child Workspace Tools and more. All this depends more or less on the revision control system, migrating it from CVS to Subversion is a straight froward task, easy to do and with a acceptable investment of time and resources. Revision history import for CVS repositories is fully support by Subversion, which means, migration of old code lines is an easy task and one don't need to deal with two revision control systems, one for old code lines, one for new ones. Subversion will be seamless integrated into the updated Versions of Collab.net's CEE. Taking all this into account, I clearly vote for subversion as the next OOo revision control system.

Havoc Penningten also blogt about the question of source control a few weeks ago and an other famous project just migrated to Subversion: Gnome

Who I am: My Name is Nils Fuhrmann, I'm working on StarOffice/OpenOffice for more then 11 years, started as Release Engineer. I was involved into the technical tasks when open sourcing the Office code and helped kicking of the localization project as the co-lead. Nowadays, I manage the operations department within Suns StarOffice organization. My team includes RE, Tools, Program Management, QA, Lab-IT. Most of you will find members of this great team continuously on OOo.