Subverting a PC - A Tale of a Version Control System

Today I moved forward twelve years in one small step. The trading system that I work on is moving from command line PVCS (circa 1994) to state of the art Subversion and I get to rewrite the entire build batch files.

Now this project which started out as a Dos based system and eventually became a GUI app has had something like 80 developers work on it at various times over the years. It has gone through innumerable versions and releases and there is a considerable body of code. Several millions lines of code in the current release alone.

One of our IT guys had engineered the export from the old PVCS file based system into the open source Subversion VCS which is server based. You can access it through a browser or by commands at the command lines.

Using Subversion for the first time I checked everything out. It took quite a while, finally finishing after 6 hours! I had extracted over 15GB of files into a folder with every release and over two million files. The moral of this tale- reading the manual first can definitely save time!