Tips for Migrating from CVS to SVN

I was asked by a couple of CVS users who want to start with SVN (using our SVN client SmartSVN) about some tips how to avoid common pitfalls. So, from my personal experience and from problems we have got reported by our users, I would consider following issues as notable:

With SVN you don’t have tags and branches as a built-in feature like in CVS. Instead, tags and branches are handled by using special paths and SVN’s cheap copy feature. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel but better stick with a default repository layout:

Quite often people check out the whole repository or project including all tags and branches. Don’t do that but only check out either the trunk or a specific tag or branch. It is quite easy to “switch” between them.

With CVS it often was common practice to add a certain tag to only a few files. Forget about tagging individual files in SVN. SVN can tag (aka copy) large parts of the repository as effective as just a small part. Another advantage of tagging always the full repository is that you are able to switch easily to that project state. If you have used file-based (not (only) project-based) tags in CVS and history doesn’t really matter to you, better import fresh project states in the SVN repository and don’t convert the CVS repository to SVN.

A lot of projects consist of multiple parts. With CVS you might have used CVS modules or shell scripts to check out from different repository locations or different repositories. SVN’s externals are a much better concept and should be used instead.