Is VisualSVN Server generally viewed as a trustworthy SVN server?

Question

is VisualSVN Server generally viewed as a trustworthy SVN server?

Stagehand

Yes, it is. Take a look at the list of enterprise users: visualsvn.com/server/customers – Cultivation

Answer 1

My company has been using it. As far as I can tell, it's just a custom distribution of SVN + Apache rolled into an installer, so its "trustworthiness" will be the same as Apache's and subversion's.

Cassino

oh how long have your company been using it? is it many people using it and it is still reliable? – Stagehand

we've been using it a few months. Shortly after I started, I made a stink about VSS (because it's really terrible). We have about 8-10 people using it and it's been just fine. Really.....I don't know what you're worried about. Underneath the hood, it's just the stock svnserve, like I said in my answer. – Cassino

I'm using it, I imported our old VSS DB into it 18+ months ago. Its been flawless since on a 12Gb repo with 310,000 revisions. – Artery

Been using it since August 2008 with no major problems. – Anticipate

Answer 2

I've been using VisualSVN Server for a few weeks along with the VisualSVN client for Visual Studio. It has been trouble free and setting it up was easier than falling off a log. The management console lets you create repositories and folders, perform simple operations on them (delete, import, etc) and set user permissions (Active Directory Integrated or SVN authentication). It just works and does just enough and no more. I think they got it exactly right.

I'm a Windows Server guy so I was a bit dubious about using Apache, but it is completely transparent and integrated into VisualSVN, if they hadn't mentioned it on the web site, I'd never have known I was running Apache. If you wanted to host other things in Apache too, then I guess you'd want to do things differently, but I wanted a turnkey solution and VisualSVN provided it.

Lait

How things can change in just a few short years! I couldn't imagine starting a project using Subversion now. We use Atlassian Stash behind our firewall and use BitBucket as a backup. – Lait

Answer 3

I've had one big issue with it.

The issue I have is that the repositories are saved with Windows line endings (Carriage Return + Line Feed) instead of the Linux line endings (Line Feed) when the repositories are in the file system format.

This has prevented me from porting the repository (with all revisions in tact) from a local network Windows server VisualSVN hosting to a public Linux SVN hosting. Since all my code is in Windows code if I change the Windows line endings to the Linux ones I mess up all my code. SVN admin tools in Linux won't recognize the repository if I don't convert them though.

So I can move an export of the code into a public repository, but I lose all the previous revision history which is a huge inconvenience but not a show-stopper.

Deipnosophist

As far as I know the fsfs files always use '\n' line endings to make them platform independenti, but even if this is not the case you can ALWAYS dump the repository and load that on the other operating system. Are you sure you use the native windows tools (and not the cygwin versions)? Cygwin sometimes breaks the explicit line ending support in Subversion when enabling their own conversion support. – Thormora

Using the native tools (Collabnet release) to dump a repository that was created by VisualSVN I get: 'vnadmin: Unknown FS type 'fsfs I didn't add those single quotes in the output from svnadmin. Using a hex editor on the db/fs-type file of the repository it has the 0D 0A (\r\n) at the end of fsfs. When I look at a repository made by TortoiseSVN, the same file has just the 0A (\n) after fsfs. I suspect it is on the VisualSVN implementation since I have successfully migraged a TortoiseSVN repository to a Linux environment. I was using VisualSVN Server 1.5.3. – Deipnosophist

Answer 4

Can you define Trustworthy? Do you mean not likely to crash or corrupt data, or do you mean able to handle a lot of traffic, or do you mean not exploited or exploitable easily?

SVN + Apache fare well in each of those categories, but I don't know what the custom portion of the installer has in it.

Infer

i mean in terms of... is it as good as installing apache and subversion server myself from scratch? i suppose corrupting data and data security also count towards this too... whether it is related to the Apache + SVN server combination or the packaging of them by Visual SVN. – Stagehand

It's all taken care of for you. That's the whole point of VisualSVN. There's very little to configure, and what little there is can be done by the admin tools included with VisualSVN. – Cassino

Answer 5

We've been using it for a while without any issues; apart from the GUIs it's the same Apache/SVN base as every other server. It's nice being able to upgrade it with an MSI, and it has a nice Windows GUI for handling AD integration, certificate management etc. They also seem to be pretty quick at getting updates out. The only two negatives (certainly when I last checked) are:

1. You are restricted to http/https access unless you want to manually set things up.
2. When you decide you want https you are stick with JUST https, you don't seem to be able to run both http and https together.

Incudes

oh how long did you use it for so far? – Stagehand

Answer 6

I've used it since a few years without any issue, it is leightweight and efficient. But heavily integrated under windows (which is not at all a problem for me)

As an alternative, Collabnet Subversion Edge looks like to be a good product but I didn't tried it.

Aniseikonia