Change Versionmanagement to Subversion

[major_king]

Hello everybody,

is it possible to change the standard integrated version-management of alfresco to subversion? Where can i find specific information how the alfresco-version-management is implemented?

Thanks for answering.
christian

[jbarmash]

Which version management are you taking about: 
The AVM (WCM) and DM versioning modes are different, because Document Management supports single document check-out, and WCM has versioning based on a sandbox (changeset). 

Category:Versioning links to articles related to versioning:
    http://wiki.alfresco.com/w/index.php?title=Category:Versioning

It's probably possible to integrate with subversion, you'd have to rip out internals and reimplement several interfaces to point to SVN.

[major_king]

Tanks for answering. I'm talking about the DM versioning. In the articels to versioning i found the following note:

Alfresco is moving to a more Subversion-like versioning system soon.

What is exactly mean by this declaration? Full subversion versioning or alfresco versioning with subversion features?

regards

[pmonks]

The AVM repository (used for the WCM functionality) is already "Subversion-like" in its approach to versioning.  Like Subversion, it supports versioning of change sets (changes that span more than a single asset), versioning of folders and versioning of structural changes (creates, deletes, renames, moves).  The AVM doesn't actually use Subversion under the covers of course - rather, the AVM was (partially) inspired by Subversion, but was implemented from scratch in Java.

If you're using the DM repository then versioning is less sophisticated.  In particular it's tied to individual files and doesn't capture the creation and deletion of those files (deleting a versioned DM file deletes both the file and its version history).

Cheers,
Peter

[major_king]

Hi Peter,

thanks for this information. The point is, that many of my customers already use subversion. So they prefer one versioning system for all than one for each topic or tool.
My first solution for this proplem is an alfresco module to connect to subversion (implementing the subversion-connection and using the alfresco-ui). Or is it better to change the versioning management layer in the alfresco source itself?

regards,
christian

[jpfi]

Hi christian,
to me , it is not clear why you'd like to use subversion in the backend. Ok, you'll get a system with some nice versioning functions, but you'll loose a whole bunch of other typical Document Management Features like Meta-Data etc. I don't see any point where you could weave subversion into alfresco.
But anyway, if you'd just use subversion as a small DMS you could have a look at opsoro (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Opsoro). Opsoro is a prototype of an alternative alfresco UI and because it uses WebScript it is loosly coupled to alfresco. So you could use opsoro as a "subversion Client/Browser".
Cheers,
Jan

[major_king]

Thanks for all this information. I will discuss this in the next meeting.

Regards,
christian

[major_king]

Hello together,

can anybody tell something about, where i can find the interface between the alfresco storage layer and the system above in the svn-project-folder? I will only reimplement the storage layer, so the other components like workflows etc are still working.

Thanks for helping!
Christian

[pjy]

Hi Christian,
Your requirements of linking into an SVN repository exactly match ours. Can you tell me if you achieved anything in this regard?
Thanks, Peter

[rdanner]

Hi Peter,

I like Jeff am not sure how you would make this happen with the Core Repository (AVM is no more) in any meaningful way – especially without a ton of work on both the UI and the back-end.

I'd really like to know more about your use case.  Can you elaborate what you are trying to achieve and what the requirements are?  How they users need to interact with the versions?  Would your users need to revert?  What would the expectation be around that capability?

I can imagine some bolt-on type scenarios with SVN but none that make a ton of sense to me, and all of them depend quite heavily on what your needs are.

/R