Question

I have just started working at a new place and they don’t have any version control at all. I’m very anxious to get some source control up and running quickly and I have been researching setting up SVN. I need to set up SVN on the same IIS server we use for development, so I don’t want to install apache if I don’t have too, running two web servers on one box seems like a road to conflicts and hair loss.

Where I’m really at a loss is the difference between
Setup-Subversion-1.6.X.msi
and
svn-python-1.6.X.win32-pyX.X.exe?
The documentation on the website seems geared towards developers of SVN.

I also can’t find any information about the differences between windows installs of SVN.
http://subversion.apache.org/packages.html#windows
Are they different installers, or completely different implementations?

Answer 1

Setup-Subversion-1.6.X.msi is the Subversion installer and will allow you to install the Subversion server and client.

svn-python-1.6.X.win32-pyX.X.exe is an installer for the Subversion Python bindings – these allow you to interact with Subversion repositories from Python.

For getting Subversion up and running quickly you’ll only need the Subversion installer – this will install svnserve, which is an easy way of serving a Subversion repository that doesn’t require Apache or IIS.

1.6.12 is the latest version of Subversion. Do you actually have an installer called Setup-Subversion-1.6.X.msi? If so then it’s an old ‘official’ installer, and you can’t get these any more (official binaries stopped at 1.6.6).

The installers listed here are indeed different installers, produced by different companies, and aren’t official. I don’t know if they modify Subversion itself, but in some cases they bundle additional software, e.g. the Apache web server and ViewVC (for browsing repositories using a web browser). Slik SVN might be what you want as it seems to be a ‘basic’ Subversion package, and includes svnserve.