Moving my SVN repository to xp-dev

For the last two years or so (I think), I have been keeping my code version-controled at assembla.com.

My code – that is, the code I write at home, most significantly my school-related code, but also more important stuff such as my never-ending Taki clone project.

Now please don’t think version-controlling my personal projects means I am organized. Version control is a cool thing for the cooly non-organized people who make a mess of their code often enough to swear in the name of the revert command. Like me! And of course remote version control also means back-up against hard disc issues.

So I chose SVN because it’s free and open-source and I know it from work; well, I know it from work because I installed it at work after years they have been using SourceSafe. And I chose web-based because I don’t feel like maintaining a local server installation, plus there’s the part where you can access it from anywhere and the remote backup thing. And I chose assembla because it looked good at the time.

Except I have just received a mail saying that they are going to cancel their free program (apparently they have announced that some time ago, but somehow I missed the message).

So I quickly Googled an alternative solution and found xp-dev, which seem to do everything I want. Signup and migration took about 10 minutes. There are short instructions here, except (by now?) you can import the repository dump through the web-interface, without emailing the support.

So far so good, but it’s only been a few hours…

(Edit: I came across this post that linked to this interview with the guy behind xp-dev. You might be interested in reading it. After all, you’re going to trust your dear code with this guy).

(Edit: apparently the spell checker of my Windows Live Writer was off when I originally wrote this post. I hope with the help of Firefox’s speller things are better now).