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

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.