Blog 3: Subversion

Subversion is a tool that is used to facilitate code version control when it comes to developing large programs. When a program is developed with more than one person it is often difficult to share what you have written with the other people that are also working on the project. Subversion is a tool that lets you work on the code individually, and then share the code with the other people via what is called a repository.
Personally, I have noticed many advantages to using Subversion. My lab partner and I have both spent a substantial amount of time working on our project thus far and there is no way that we would be able to coordinate our schedules so that we could work together on our project at the same time. Subversion allows us to work on our program whenever we get the opportunity, and then when we are done we can commit our work to our repository for the other one to see. Another nice feature about Subversion is that all of the versions of your code are kept, so if necessary, it is possible to revert back to an older version of your code. A third advantage to Subversion is that each time someone commits a new revision to his or her repository, that person is to include a brief message or description about what he or she is changing, that way the next time someone updates his or her repository, he or she can read the description and then have a descent idea of what was changed, or what still needs to be done.
Despite the many advantages to Subversion, there are also a few shortcomings. The biggest problem that my lab partner and I have run into with Subversion is resolving conflicts. If the two of us are working on our code at the same time and one person commits their work without updating first, conflicts may arise. This has happened on more than one occasion, the first of which ended with me reverting back to an older version of our code because there were so many conflicts. We have since become more responsible about using Subversion and we are much more careful about committing our work. I suppose that conflicts are not really a shortcoming to Subversion, rather the user just has to know what he or she is doing, which can be problematic with anything.
Overall I would say that I have had a positive experience with Subversion and would recommend it to anyone who is involved with large programming projects, especially if they are spread out amongst other programmers. It takes some getting use to, however, once you get the hang of it you can really capitalize on the benefits that it has to offer.