Version control systems - any suggestions?

• September 14, 2006
• James Skemp
• general programming, software, StrivingLife

Version control is something that I've been interested in for the past several months (actually, what month is it, September? I guess it's been longer than just a couple of months) but that I haven't been able to dig into as much as I'd like.

Subversion keeps coming up as a good piece of software, with the addition of Trac. Since I wrote the guide to installing Apache 2.0.x a bit ago, I have no reason for not getting started with Subversion.

Today, from somewhere, I was directed to SyntEvo's product, SmartSVN. Right now I'm using WinMerge (very happily) for my file compare utility at both home and during the '8-5', but SyntEvo seems to have a fairly nice utility itself, albeit at a steep (at least, as a small-time developer who finds WinMerge to be exactly what I need) price.

Since I've had good luck with asking questions and getting answers before, I'm going to throw some product names around, and see if I can get some recommendations. I've dug around Google enough that I know there's a lot to choose from, but sometimes digging through a lot of content makes it hard to pick a direction.

That said, any thoughts/recommendations/reviews/rants/raves on the following products?

Subversion, Trac, SmartSVN, SmartCVS, SyntEvo (company name, but it still gets thrown in), version control systems.

• subversion
• svn