Apache Subversion 1.8 Released

After almost two years, a new version 1.8 has been released for Apache Subversion on June 18, 2013. The release notes can be found here.

Most of the new features and changes affect the source code management system under the hood, such as performance improvements in the repository file system implementation.

Noteworthy for the end-user are the following improvements:

• Files and directories moved in a working copy with svn move are now treated specially by some Subversion operations. Moving files in a mixed-revision working copy is refused. Committing a move is only allowed when both sides of the move (copy and delete) are part of the same commit. Resolving tree conflicts is made easier and can be performed by Subversion automatically.
• Reintegration merges are done automatically by svn merge. Thus, the --reintegrate option for svn merge has been deprecated. A reintegrating merge has to decide which revisions of a branch have to be included into a merge, which is necessary for merging feature branches.
• Inherited properties allow a property which is set on a path to be visible from the path’s children.
• Auto-props and ignores can be set in the repository with the two new reserved properties svn:auto-props and svn:global-ignores. These properties override the local settings in the user runtime configuration area. By that, auto-props and ignores can be centrally configured for a project and need not to be individually defined by each contributor in their local settings.
• New tools and utilities for administrators: a benchmarking client svn-bench allows for measuring the performance of a Subversion server instance. fsfs-stats provides statistics about the repository’s file system.