Most of the places I've worked in the software world used CVS as the version control software. I can't tell you how many times I've cursed CVS because it will usually end up doing something stupid, and the only way out is to go in as a Unix administrator and mess with the repository to fix it. More than once I've done this and ended up messing up every developer in the place. Hacking the repository is a no-no. But the poorly written software often leaves you no other choice. With CVS there's no such thing as a mistake. If you put a file into the system, you've put it there forever. If you create a bug that wipes out your hard drive and make the mistake of checking it in, it's always there to wipe out the hard drives of any sucker that chances on that bad revision.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I'm now using subversion. Every single little thing that I hated about cvs has been fixed in svn. It's probably safe to assume that subversion was written by a group of ex-CVS admins who got tired of doing the same stupid things over and over.

Now if only I can get my webserver to load it up...  apache doesn't build mod_dav by default, which the svn webserver module seems to need. Apache likewise doesn't seem to want to rebuild since I upgraded my zlib for the mySQL upgrade -- it's getting a header conflict. I had to update zlib because mySQL wanted a more recent version of Berkeley DB, and Berkeley DB wanted a more recent version of about thirty different packages... Sigh... Back to upgrade hell. The problem with Linux is that it's always a moving target. Make that a few thousand moving targets that are all moving at different speeds, with each depending on hundreds of other projects which also move at varying speeds. 

Try plugging that into a spreadsheet...