why subversion really rocks

Subversion leaps giantly forward. Not only some opensource people are using it, now a lot of large companies try to make the switch. And I do not speak of some old fashioned CVS-users how just try new things: There are companies outside which will abandon their commercial version management systems for subversion.
I think the main reason for this is subversions model of representing version control:
At the end users are most comfortable with the most common computer metaphor:
the file(-system)
Nearly all users now how to copy, rename move and delete files. I think all developers know.
Subversion breaks not with this metaphor, it just enhances it with a new dimension: time. This makes the learning curve so shallow. You do not need anything to now about branches, tags or anything else. Just this: a commit saves your versions into the repository and creates a new revision an update will get changes from your coworkers into your workingcopy.
Of course there are voices against this simple model: some people think it is a problem that svn doesn't support native tags or branches but I think as long as you can map this usecases on your filesystem more people will understand what is happening. So if your branches/tags are just plain directories, it is much easier to grasp than an abstract concept for people who do not work day to day with version control.

a small script for searching in subversion repositories..

If you are using subversion for versioncontrol, you might have sometimes the need to search for a string in all files.. here is a small script for doing this without checking the whole repository out.
This script needs only 1 argument: the string to search for.
PLEASE NOTE! change first and second line to match your own Repository.

REPO="svn"
BASEURL="http://svn.collab.net/repos/"
SEARCH=$1
svn ls -R "${BASEURL}${REPO}/trunk/" | while read file;
do
   result=`expr match "$file" '.*/$' | cat`
   if [ $result == 0 ]; then  
     result=`svn cat "${BASEURL}${REPO}/trunk/$file" | grep $SEARCH | cat`
     if [ -n "$result" ]; then
       echo "${BASEURL}${REPO}/trunk/$file"
     fi
   fi
done