Subversion 1.8 learns new moves and brings automatic reintegration

The developers of Apache Subversion have released the latest version of the source code control tool. Apache Subversion 1.8 introduces a new behaviour for moves, automatic detection for reintegration merges of branches, new property inheritance functions, and the ability to have the repository dictate configuration settings, as well as other new features and performance improvements.

With Subversion 1.8, the result of an svn move command is now different from issuing an svn copy followed by the svn delete command. The copy and delete actions performed by svn move are now linked together and that is reflected when getting history information with svn status and svn info, and the file is tracked as a single file. Subversion will now automatically detect during merges if a branch is being reintegrated and this automatic reintegration means the --reintegrate flag is now deprecated and the developers discourage its use.

The introduction of property inheritance gives Subversion the ability to find the properties of the parent of a versioned object in question. While this can be used to inherit properties from parent objects, it does not change how Subversion uses properties in any way. This means that if a user does not have read access to the parent path, properties from that path can not be inherited.

Making use of this feature, a new option to store configuration settings in a repository will give users the ability to put settings in the repository that override client-side settings. This is useful for repository administrators who would like to ensure that all developers working on a particular code base are using particular settings.

Other new features in Subversion 1.8 include the introduction of the svn-bench benchmarking client, the server-side fsfs-stats statistics command, in-memory caching of passwords and a number of other improvements. A detailed list is available in the Apache Subversion 1.8 Release Notes. Source code for Subversion 1.8 can be downloaded from the project's download page and unofficial binary packages are also available. These are expected to begin updating to 1.8 soon.

(fab)