Preparing your repository for branching and merging can turn into a headache when you do it for the first time. This is a small .. may be obvious .. note to everybody who can get some help
My setup
- SVN Server hosted on linux
- Tortoise SVN as client being used from windows
If you perform following checks before getting into the process of branching and merging, you are going to save a lot of time and efforts trying to figure out errors messages and causes
- Make sure your SVN Server version is above 1.5. If not, UPGRADE. In my case it was 1.4.2 and I upgraded it to 1.6.* from Collabnet
- Make sure your SVN Repository version is upgraded. You can find that out by using following commands
cd /path/to/repo/reponame
cd db
cat format
i.e. changing to repo/directory/db and looking at contents of format file. For 1.4.*, format file showed 2, which should be 4 for it to be a 1.6.* repository. I had to upgrade the repository version by using
svnadmin upgrade path/to/repo/reponame
- Make sure your SVN Client is equipped to handle features offered by the upgraded SVN Server. I just downloaded version of tortoise svn made for 1.6 version
After these checks, you can choose the model you want to opt for your process and get started.
In my case, I chose mainline development happening in trunk, creating branches after each phase release. Every-time a bug is fixed in a branch, its committed to its corresponding branch. Then from trunk, using TortoiseSVN’s “reintegrate a branch” option, I choose repository URL of branch and follow through steps to finish the merge. It works wonders !
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List of SVN utility commands that I needed to use frequently apart from commit and update. Feel free to add to the list
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Assumptions:
You already have SVN installed on your linux server. If you do not know if it is installed, just type command
which svn
If this returns a valid path as output, then it means that svn is installed on your linux box. If not, you need to install it. Installing subversion is very easy (for most distributions) and ample documentation is available on the web. You can start with http://subversion.apache.org/.
Four steps to complete svn repository creation on linux
- log onto server as root
- I prefer to have all svn repositories in one directory for better organization and easy maintenance. So next step for me would be to change to my svn directory.
cd /svnRepos
If you do not already have a directory for svn repositories, I would recommend creating one.
mkdir svnRepos
- Create repository using following command
svnadmin create /path/to/repo/RepoName
where : RepoName is the name of repository to be created. As an example, I want to create a repository for my testproject. I would write
svnadmin create testproject
- Change group ownership of repository for the intended group. In this case, consider I have a user group created as “all” and I want this group to have ownership to this repository.
chown -R :all /path/to/repo/RepoName
- Grant Read/Write/Execute permissions to “all” on this repository
chmod -R 770 /path/to/repo/RepoName
After this, all you need to do is
- Install a client like tortoiseSVN on the user’s machine
- SVN Checkout the repository. I would use a URL like following to connect to my newly created repository
svn+ssh://username@servername/path/to/repo/RepoName
Where
- username: one of the users from group all
- servername: my linux server which hosts SVN
For my testproject, the path looks like
svn+ssh://jyotsnas@servername/svnRepos/testproject
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