Migrating to subversion

I used CVS for a while for keeping my desktop and laptop in sync, as well as for versioning all of my school stuff and programming web projects. While it worked fine, I did find that it wasn’t great for binary data (because of its basis on RCS) and the fuss involved in copying, moving and deleting was tiresome.

After reading this I decided to give subversion a try. It was pretty easy to set up, and it works insanely well with binary data, because it uses binary differencing on all files, making the distinction moot.

Before I got started with subversion though, I wanted to clear out all of the CVS administrative directories so I wasn’t versioning those as well. Well, since there is a CVS directory in every directory in the tree, I didn’t want to remove them all manually. Luckily, TLUG came to the rescue with this: find . -type d -name CVS | xargs rm -Rf. Very nice, and useful in a lot of ways. I’ll have to spend some time with man xargs though, because I think that I’ll be glad to know it better.