A scant couple of days ago, Subversion (the project) formally graduated from its incubation phase, becoming a full-fledged Apache project at subversion.apache.org. It seemed like almost yesterday that it had been accepted as a candidate by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF)… 
In fact, it was in late 2009 that the proposal to join the ASF had been filed, and just a few months later, it made its way toward acceptance.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with what Subversion is, it is an open source file-associated content versioning system. Many developers who are familiar with RCS, SCCS, and CVS have probably heard about Subversion (SVN) as the “next step” toward versioning “modernity” or “modernness”, especially for those who are transitioning from traditional code branching and merging toward changeset management techniques. For people participating in agile configuration management (CM) and coding initiatives, Subversion may have even been selected as the primary (or even, sole) versioning system.
For those of you approaching CM for the first time during this latest iteration of Web development (circa 2006 and onward), while you may be more familiar (and even using) distributed/disconnected/decentralized versioning systems like Mercurial (hg) or Git or even monotone, you also may have heard of Subversion as one of the last vestiges of centralized versioning systems that organizations that have moved onto the current system have used in the past.
For others, the folks who have been using commercial versioning products like StarTeam or ClearCase, you may be scratching your head and wondering what all the fuss is about. 
And for those you who’ve been deep in the CM trenches for awhile, you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, it’s about time.” 
There are benefits and disadvantages to the features that Subversion provides, and depending on your development requirements, it may be 100% the tool to use, or it may cover enough of the features that you need that it’ll do the trick, or it may be insufficient to match your needs. But it always seems to be on everybody’s short list for consideration, replacing the position that the venerable CVS once held.
For public repository access, Subversion is very popular because a couple of its access methods involve leveraging HTTP rather than a proprietary protocol. For that matter, you may find site hosting services offering Subversion as a way to manage versioned content for Web sites due to its support for WebDAV (however incomplete) as well as to support development codebases, big and small.
So, we’re tickled pink that Subversion has made its way to ASF as a full-fledged graduated project at this time. Kudos! 
