How to use SVN

SVN is a program which keeps track of all the different versions of our source files. People familiar with its predecessor, cvs should read on. If you have not heard of cvs, then read this document (concentrate on the big picture, and ignore the details). This documentation is written because of our transition to SVN. When the transition period is over, we will rewrite these pages. While waiting, this page will contain information useful for our present cvs users.

Our main subversion repository is at the address http://victorio.uit.no/langtech/. Subversion documentation is available as a browsable book.

Graphical Subversion clients

If you want to use a graphical Subversion client, please see the following pages for descriptions of some alternatives, and their setup for our repositories:

RapidSVN - a multi-platform, open-source GUI front-end (home page)
Versions.app - a Mac only, commercial client (home page)
SvnX - a Mac only, open-source client (home page here and here)

Please follow the recommendations for daily routines at the end of this document!

The major benefit of graphical clients is that they make some operations that much easier and faster. YMMV, and you have to try to find what suits your working habits best yourself. In the end, a combination of graphical and command-line tools could be the best approach.

Use svn on the command line

Note

This document describes how to check out and work with svn. For issues related to the conversion from cvs to svn, read this document.

To check out means that you copy all the documents that our projects are working on to your computer.

The first commands

Go to your home directory (write cd), and give the following command:

svn co https://victorio.uit.no/langtech/trunk main --username <your_username>

... where you have replaced <your_username> with the username you have aquired from the admin. This will enable you to check in your work. If you don't have a user name or just want to browse our code, just skip the username.

After you have checked out, please run the following script, and follow the on-screen instructions:

main/gt/script/gtsetup.sh

With the above commands, you have now on your local computer a copy of the source code and the environment is set up properly.

Frequently used commands

Now that you have checked out your repository, you can use a set of commands to manipulate your copy of the source code. We recommend to always update the repository before you begin to edit files inside it. After having edited some files you usually want to have an overview of which files have been modified. To share our work with the others we check in our work. We can also add, delete, move and copy files inside the repository. A brief overview of the commands needed for these actions is given below, for further details see the references at the end of this document.

Update your working copy: svn up
Scedule a file for addition: svn add filename
Scedule a file for deletion: svn delete filename
You may also copy and move files and directories with these two commands, but read about them in the svn book first:: svn copy filename
svn move filename
Examine your changes: svn status
Examine the file history: svn log filename
Compare your modified file to the version in the repository: svn diff filename
Compare some earlier versions, say here versions 123 and 120: svn diff -r 123:120 filename
Possibly undo the changes you just checked in: svn revert filename
Resolve Conflicts (Merge Others' Changes): svn update
svn resolved
Commit your changes: svn ci -m "Your short message here" filename
(Note that the above changes, add, delete, copy, move, must all be committed by ci in order to take effect)

Ignoring items

The Subversion svn:ignore property is very similar in syntax and function to the CVS .cvsignore file. In fact, if you are migrating a CVS working copy to Subversion, you can directly migrate the ignore patterns by using the .cvsignore file as input file to the svn propset command:

$ svn propset svn:ignore -F .cvsignore . 
property 'svn:ignore' set on '.' 
$

More details about ignoring files can be found in Chapter 3: Advanced Topics, in the section Ignoring Unversioned Items, in the SVN book.

How often do I check in?

Always check in the files at the end of the day. If you know that other people are working on the same file, you should check in more often than that. You should also check in after you have done major revisions. Remember to compile the program before you check in, so that you know you do not check in a defect file.