Single-User Subversion and Multiuser Subversion by Rafael Garcia-Suarez explain the setup of the Subversion version control system which tends to be the better CVS. He demonstrates how to use it for multiuser, distributed projects aswell as single user enviroments. What can this modern, powerful source-control system do for you?

Subversion is an open source revision control system, similar in purpose to the well-known, widely deployed, and aging CVS. It is designed to provide state-of-the-art versioning, built from modern technologies.

Subversion is still in development and has not reached version 1.0 yet. However, it's pretty stable and you can use it right now. In this article, we'll cover the basics of Subversion, how to install it, and how to use Subversion for personal projects. A future article will cover installing and using

Also checkout a previous post…

Current Version ist Subversion 0.35 (code complete on Friday 12 December 2003, release one week later)...

Goal of the Subversion project is to build a revision control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. Interims release 0.35 will be available in 2 weeks, features planned for 1.0 include:

• Most current CVS features : Subversion is meant to be a better CVS, so it will have most of CVS's features, with as many as possible in the 1.0 release.
• Directories, renames, and file meta-data are versioned : lack of these features is one of the most common omplaints against CVS
• commits are truly atomic
• Apache serving via WebDAV/DeltaV
• Branching and tagging are cheap (constant time) operations
• Natively client/server, layered library design
• Client/server protocol sends diffs in both directions
• Costs are proportional to change size, not data size
• Efficient handling of binary files : subversion is equally efficient on binary as on text files, because it uses a binary diffing algorithm to transmit and store successive revisions.
• Parseable output : all output of the Subversion command-line client is carefully designed to be both human readable and automatically parseable; scriptability is a high priority.