ViewCVS

Perhaps the first—and definitely the most popular—utility to take advantage of Subversion's public API is ViewCVS. ViewCVS is essentially a CGI script which enables browsing of the files and directories of a version control system. Originally designed as a Python-based replacement for the popular cvsweb utility, [51] ViewCVS provides a full-featured Web-based interface to CVS repositories, allowing folks to see the version control history of the files in those repositories and to perform such nifty tasks as generating differences between arbitrary versions of those files.

In the early part of 2002, the repository accessing portion of ViewCVS was modularized into a semi-generic interface, and a pair of modules were grown to provide that functionality for CVS repositories. Later that year, Subversion's Python language bindings sufficiently matured, and a Subversion repository module was written for the ViewCVS interface. Now, ViewCVS is able to browse Subversion repositories, providing essentially the same history and differencing mechanisms for those repositories as are available for CVS ones.

For more information on ViewCVS, see the project's website at http://viewcvs.sf.net/.



[51] CVSWeb was written in Perl.