I wish I was at OSCON: 'Subversion Best Practices'

Friday, July 28, 2006

In the same spirit as this week’s revision control article, I ran across a great summary of an OSCON presentation entitled “Subversion Best Practices” (via: Brad Choate). Normally, I'd just stuff this into my linkroll and leave it at that, but this is really interesting material that’s worth talking about. Ben Collins-Sussman & Brian W. Fitzpatrick’s (Subversion developers, and co-authors of “Version Control with Subversion”) presentation deals with the way Subversion is actually used on large software projects. Two ideas that jumped out at me:

Binary file modifications; or other files that can’t be merged. You’d want to lock such files to prevent conflicts. Property svn:needs-lock accommodates this. It checks out the file as read-only, and becomes read/write once you lock it for modifications. If you try to lock and can’t, it’s because someone else is working on the file.
hotcopy versus rsync: Use hotcopy to make the backup to preserve consistency, then use rsync on that.

I learned some things just by flipping through Brad’s summary of the presentation, and I'm hoping a more detailed report pops up at some point soon, because it looks like there was some great client-side stuff in there that Brad’s summary doesn’t really give enough insight into.

This entry was published on Friday, July 28, 2006. Articles published around the same time can be found in the archive.

Further reading: If you enjoyed this post, you might like to take a look at some of my other posts about ‘Subversion’. I've also made available a list of all the topics I've written about if you're interested in my (folkless) folksonomy.