CodePlex To Roll Out TortoiseSVN Support

May 21, 2007 oss suggest edit

This just in. CodePlex is planning to roll out TortoiseSVN support!

A little while ago I wrote a comparison of TFS vs Subversion for Open Source projects. I’ll spare you the suspense by telling you that Subversion wins hands down, primarily because it itself is open source and is designed with open source in mind.

It turned out that there was already a work item for SVN support and it was the highest vote getter. On Friday, Jim Newkirk commented within the work item that they are adding support for TortoiseSVN. You can see in the work Item Details (click to enlarge) that it is set to release on June 5, 2007.

Jim’s comment mentions TortoiseSVN support specifically, but I assumed he meant Subversion support. Unless they are building some sort of Subversion bridge to TFS.

As I wrote in a recent post, there appears to be two camps at Microsoft in regards to Open Source - the old guard who are threatened by it, and the new guard who are embracing it as the opportunity it really is for Microsoft. CodePlex is emblematic of the new guard. They are listening to their users and building something that really will benefit the .NET OSS community. My heartfelt kudos to the CodePlex team!

Now it’s time for me to approach the rest of the Subtext devs to talk about a potential move after June 5. Of course, being pragmatic. I’ll want to test it out first. Kick the tires before making any commitments.

UPDATE: It looks like the CodePlex team has created a Subversion bridge to TFS. In other words, from the outside, it looks just like Subversion so you can connect using TortoiseSVN and SVN.exe, but under the hood, it is TFS. Technologically speaking, that sounds pretty cool. It couldn’t have been trivial. However, I’m a bit skeptical it will have (and maintain) feature parity, but I’m looking forward to trying it out. Not exactly what I hoped for, but I won’t sit around and bitch about it if it works.

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Comments

18 responses

Scott • May 21st, 2007
This is excellent news, even if Subtext stays where it is.
Rob Conery • May 21st, 2007
Jonathan Wanagel commented on Ayende's blog that TFS doesn't scale with anonymous access - it would have to if Tortoise sat on it wouldn't it?
My thinking on this is that if they try to roll out Tortoise as some sort of appeasement for Subversion it would really be Marie Antoinettish of them.
If they do roll out Subversion - SubSonic is sooooo there.
Zack Owens • May 21st, 2007
Yo Rob, glad to hear you are heading back to CodePlex. It just doesn't seem the same since you left and went to Google Code for the source code. I liked the "Download" link that CodePlex has.
Anyways, this is really good news.
Ayende Rahien • May 21st, 2007
Can you explain why SVN support would cause you to move from an already established repository to a new site?
It seems to me like a PITA without a lot of benefits from the move.
Haacked • May 21st, 2007
Have you used the forums at SourceForge? Godawful! No Wikis. Nothing. It sucks.
Steven Harman • May 21st, 2007
>> a Subversion bridge to TFS
Eww... I think I need a shower now.
Haacked • May 21st, 2007
Well here's my take on it. If it truly provides feature parity. In other words, from the outside I can't tell the difference. Does it matter? It's like the turing test of source control emulation. ;)
If it does have parity, then I think that's pretty sweet. Though it leaves me wondering how they plan to keep up parity with new Subversion releases.
Simone Chiaretta • May 21st, 2007
I think a good solution will be to keep the code at SF and move the forum to our own project site
DotNetKicks.com • May 21st, 2007
You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com
Haacked • May 21st, 2007
Yeah, that's what Rob is doing with Subsonic. Using the CodePlex forums and wiki, but keeping the code at google code.
Joe Brinkman • May 21st, 2007
I wonder why all of the Open Source code repositories suck in one way or another. I am waiting for one of the major sites to finally see that what projects need is a complete package. One with a decent integrated VCS, Item Tracking, Forums, Wiki, and maybe even a nice blog. Oh and you should be able to get a sh*tload of metrics on every aspect of the project. It is almost as if they only want you to store your code on their servers but keep all of your other project stuff somewhere else.
Finally, the site should not look like it was built by a bunch of blind 5th graders with no design skills. I mean really - how much would it cost SourceForge to pay a designer to make the site look like it was actually built sometime in the last decade. Everytime I go there I keep expecting to see blinking or scrolling text telling me about the current project of the month.
While we're at it, how about actually making it easy to search for and find projects. Give me some rich search tools that actually understand that I am looking for projects that meet a certain criteria. I don't code in PHP and could care less that you have 500 projects written in PHP that also happen to use my search term. Oh what about all those C, Perl, Haskell, Java, Ruby (ok maybe I'm interested) or python projects. Just show me the friggin .Net projects that are about "X". Oh and make sure that someone has actually worked on those projects sometime in the last century.
Is this asking for too much?
Steven Harman • May 21st, 2007
@All: Maybe it's time we built our own OSS project hosting solution... seriously.
Haacked • May 21st, 2007
@Joe - Koders.com does a pretty decent job of searching SourceForge. The problem is that SF doesn't provide any sort of project feed that I know of, so we have to rely on people submitting projects to koders or crawling.
Haacked • May 21st, 2007
@Steve - We could consider contributing to SharpForge. They just hit the self-hosting milestone.
Joe Brinkman • May 21st, 2007
@Phil - I was talking more about a search based on various pieces of project meta-data. Whether it is project activity, keyword, language, last check-in, etc. All of the data exists in the db, it is just that in many cases the sites don't expose a form that allows for this level of search. SourceForge has one of the best, but there are still basic searches that I cannot do. For example, go to any repository and try to find a BSD, C# project with a release in the last 6 months using the keyword of your choice. What good is a repository of 100,000 OS projects if you cannot do any meaningful searches. I have not used Koders enough to be able to comment on all its features, but it is not at all obvious that I could answer the above question. To me this is a feature that the repository should provide.
Sharpforge looks like it is a good start for a repository. Unfortunately it is not setup to actually scale for the 1000s or 100s of thousands of projects like a SourceForge or CodePlex. I am not sure how well their code will scale when you have users hitting forums across 1000 different projects. But definitely something to keep in mind and watch.
Scott • May 22nd, 2007
@Joe Brinkman.
I like the way Freshmeat.net is set up. Lets you narrow the scope of your search by a few pre-defined terms (platform, language) and stack the filters up.
Scott B. • May 23rd, 2007

Hi all SharpForge founder here,
I've not updated the road map yet but somewhere between September - November we will be migrating the 6000+ members and 3500+ projects from Projxpert to run on SharpForge.
So SharpForge will then be running thousands of projects if not hundreds of thousands.
The multi-tenant design will be used to host projxpert.com, sharpforge.org and other project hosting sites with a single application/database.
If you've got some good ideas of what you would like SharpForge to do you can create a new work item and get people to vote for it.
Kelly White • May 27th, 2007
In case you haven&#39;t already heard . It looks like the CodePlex team has created a Subversion bridge