The first public release candidate of the version management system Subversion has been released. The goal of the Subversion project is to create a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community.

Key features of the new release include:

• Path-based authorization for svnserve
• Improved logging and repository listing in mod_dav_svn
• Hugely improved python and ruby bindings
• A handful of new commandline switches
• Some client and server performance improvements
• Many improved APIs
• More than 30 new bugfixes

Subversion 1.3 is a superset of all previous Subversion releases. All features in 1.0.x, 1.1.x, or 1.2.x is present in 1.3, but 1.3 contains features and bugfixes not present in any earlier release. The new features will eventually be documented in a 1.3 version of the free Subversion book.