The most common use of Subversion is to keep source code of applications versioned and secure. However, there are quite a few other options that are not so common at all.
Quickly read on and find out if maybe you can put Subversion to use in quite a few ways you didn’t expect.
1. CMS
Maybe CMS is a bit strong, but it’s very easy to develop a static website locally and store it in Subversion. You just checkout your website on your production server and you’re good to go. You can easily jump back to previous content and you always have a backup around.
2. Todo list / Notes
You can version a list of text files as todo items or notes. You can check it out anywhere you want and keep track of all your past notes and items. You will have to establish some sort of formatting convention for yourself as how you name files and all that.
3. Backups
Put your entire home directory in Subversion. You’ll always have a backup handy and you can easily jump back in time! Maybe it’s not as sophisticated as Mac OS X Leopard’s Time Machine, but it serves its purpose.
4. Community Story Writing
It’s a bit like coding. You could use Subversion to write a story (or manuscript or book or …) as a community. It’s a bit like a wiki, but you can all use your favourite editors. You’ll have to agree on an ASCII based file format, though.
Maybe you know some very cool way to use Subversion as well? Please comment below!
You forgot one of the best ones, keeping /etc in svn! I’ve started doing this on all my servers now and it’s great. Before you do apt-get install apache, you commit /etc, then you install apache, and you do svn add . –force, and commit again. You have a list of every file added, every file modified etc, and you can easily roll back at any time. Awesome to get a log of every config file, if you ever have problems etc.
I’d love to see a solution where this was tied automatically to apt-get so it could autocommit or something, but so far I just do it whenever I remember. (If you remember to commit at a clean install, it’s also a great way of documenting all the changes you ‘ve made, for someone taking over).
A Google SoC project this summer looks at making a nice graphical tool to put your home directory in SVN.
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Are there any example of people using Subversion for media heavy projects such as a DVD, film or computer game assets?
Concerning the use of Subversion as Content Management System (CMS for websites), one should keep in mind that Subversion does not keep track of file permissions.
There are some ways to deal with that (svn wrappers, a special svn version, or separate permission-tweaking scripts on the web server), but none of them is really convenient, IMHO.
Use subversion for ISO9001 procedure documentation control
“Are there any example of people using Subversion for media heavy projects such as a DVD, film or computer game assets?”
The Blender foundation.