With the release of CollabNet Subversion Edge 1.1.0 today, I am pleased to announce that the Beta period has ended and the product has now reached GA status. The Beta period was hugely successful as we saw well in excess of a thousand installations. We also received a lot of positive feedback from users and identified some bugs that were fixed in the 1.0.1 and 1.1.0 releases. You can find some details on the fixes and enhancements in the release notes.
The most significant enhancement in Subversion Edge 1.1 is that the server can now be connected to a CollabNet TeamForge 5.4 server and controlled via TeamForge. The conversion process is a very simple wizard that reconfigures your Subversion Edge server so that it is controlled by TeamForge. Existing repositories on the server are connected with TeamForge automatically so that they can be easily managed from the TeamForge web UI. Connecting Subversion Edge to TeamForge brings a number of significant new capabilities to your Subversion installation.
- Subversion Edge is capable of managing a single Subversion server while TeamForge is capable of managing an unlimited number of Subversion Edge servers. So all of your servers can be united under a single management framework. We find it is very common for teams and departments within an organization, particularly geographically distributed organizations, to each have their own Subversion server and repositories. Subversion Edge makes this easier than ever with its simple installation process and web-based configuration. TeamForge allows you to keep all of these local servers but elevate the management and traceability to a centralized level.
- Subversion Edge includes built-in roles that allow you to delegate some of the management responsibilities to multiple users within an organization. However, these roles are all still system-wide. If you can manage one repository, you can manage all of them. TeamForge introduces the concept of the Project Workspace and roles can be created within a project to delegate administration functions within the project. So this allows you to give teams the permission to self-manage their projects, but not the projects of other users. With the combination of Subversion Edge and TeamForge, a project can even have multiple Subversion repositories that reside on different Subversion Edge servers.
- Subversion Edge supports path-based permissions, but TeamForge kicks it up a few notches. First off, it provides an easy GUI for managing the permissions. The kicker is that this is combined with the Role-Based Access Control capabilities of TeamForge. So as new users join a project and are assigned to various groups and roles, their Subversion permissions are applied automatically according to the roles that you have created for you site and project.
- TeamForge provides more tools for your team to use. You might be thinking that a full-blown ALM system is more than you want or need. Maybe you already are using a bug tracker that is working for you and you do not want to change that right now. With the release of TeamForge 5.4, a new "SCM mode" has been added that is aimed squarely at Subversion Edge users. This allows you to bring in TeamForge at a lower price point and just take advantage of a subset of the tools. All of the Subversion management features are available as are Project Workspaces, Discussions, Wiki and Build and Test integration. If, after migrating to TeamForge, you have a team of users that wants to adopt the Agile ALM capabilities of TeamForge, you can add ALM licenses for just those users so that you can adopt ALM features at a pace you are comfortable with.
The ability to convert Subversion Edge to TeamForge is available for Linux users today and will be available for Windows users with the release of Subversion Edge 1.2 at the end of this month. Windows users are still free to enjoy the standalone Subversion Edge 1.1 features today.
A couple other new features in the 1.1 release that I want to mention:
- Improved support for Linux. Subversion Edge 1.0.x was qualified on Red Hat 5.x and CentOS 5.x. While it generally also worked well on nearly all other Linux distributions, we did find some issues with the Subversion Python language bindings (needed for ViewVC) on distributions with Python 2.5 or greater installed. With this release, we have solved those problems and Subversion Edge should work well on any Linux distribution with Python 2,4, 2.5 or 2,6 installed. We have added SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 to the list of distributions we officially qualify for release. We have developers that work and test on the latest Ubuntu and Fedora releases and Subversion Edge is known to work well on those distributions, though they are not officially supported.
- ViewVC is now configured to use mod_python instead of CGI. This gives improved performance of ViewVC as well as improved scalability on the server. This is used on Windows and Linux.
- Logging levels can now be set from the web UI. Being able to enable debug logging and then turn it off again, makes it easier to diagnose problems, such as getting LDAP configuration settings right.
Please continue to provide us with your feedback in the Subversion Edge forum on openCollabNet.