CollabNet SVN Server or VisualSVN?

Question

I want to set up a SVN Server on a Windows 2003 system.

At the moment I am not sure if I should install CollabNet-SVN or VisualSVN. I have read, that CollabNet-SVN only provides a command line client for administration and that it is a little bit tedious to set it up. VisualSVN comes with a GUI based administration client, which is easy to use.

Therefore I have some questions:

Are there free administration tools (with a GUI) for CollabNet SVN Server ?

Are there short and easy to learn tutorials to use CollabNet SVN ?

Visual SVN installs Apache too ! For CollabNet SVN this is not necessary. Are there problems, if there is also an active IIS on the Windows Server ?

Is it better to use CollabNet SVN with an apache installation ? In my case web access is not necessary !

Are the capabilities of Visual SVN (Standard Edition) and CollabNet SVN equal ?

Answer 1

Visual SVN Server indeed has a nice GUI for repository maintenance and setting up access rights. In addition, it also allows you to set access rights using your windows accounts (windows authentication), which can make your life a lot easier.

During my quick tests, I did not find any problems with with IIS due to installing Visual SVN Server (it allows you to use a different port than the standard 443). BTW: Visual SVN Server uses the https:// protocol, whereas with svnserve you could use svn://.

These are the reasons why I will switch to Visual SVN Server soon.

Answer 2

As many have mentioned in their answers, Subversion has two major protocols: http/https or svn.

svn protocol

Pro:

• fast
• very simple to setup, no need for 3rd party software

Con:

• Simple file based authentication setup
  • So user cannot manage their own password
  • No encryption on password

http/https protocol

Pro:

• Support wide range of authentication system, pretty much anything Apache HTTP server support.
• Because of the above, it can be integrated into your company's authentication system like LDAP/ActiveDirectory.
• https protocol can encrypt your communication, if that is a concern.
• Flexibility of connection management, like going through firewall.
• Allow you to browse your repository through web browser

Con:

• Slower Much improved in Subversion 1.7 release.
• More complicated to manage. Especially if you want fine grain access configurations and serving multiple repositories on the same server.

So depend on what you need, you can pick which protocol suit you best.

We use both protocols at our place, where internally we mostly use svn protocol and http/https protocol to expose our repository to public.

Answer 3

VisualSVN is limited to http:// and https:// protocols.
However, svn:// protocol is much faster, so I suggest using CollabNet SVN for performance reasons.

Answer 4

CollabNet is now CollabNetServerEdge. The main change is it uses Apache instead of svnserve (still included though), and makes it easier to setup. It has a browser based admin console. It also adds features like integrated viewvc for code browsing and ldap authenication. The down side is the windows authentication is very clumsy and will create duplicate accounts if the user isn't careful with the case of the user name. It also doesn't use the security groups from active directory either, so it's a pointless, insecure feature. ViewVC is good for external users or people without an svn client, but we have gotten by without that feature for years.

Another downside of collabnet is importing old repositories requires a dump to import from. I found that the larger repositories can take hours to perform a dump. VisualSVN server only needed to copy the repository.

I like ankhSVN so I started with Collabnet edge, but now I'm leaning towards VisualSVN server.