Linux Training : c. Subversion

Subversion

Subversion is a tool for tracking code changes. Using subversion it is easy to have multiple people developing on a project at the same time. It facilitates tracking who changed what and why. The main source for subversion is http://subversion.apache.org/.

A brief help is available from the command itself:

svn help

An online book about subversion is here.

Uses

  • To checkout a repository
    • cd /path/to/local/source; svn co <repo source
      • At FOOBAR INC we use svn over ssh.
        To check out the FOOBAR INC docs repo

        mkdir ~/docs ~/pl-3-bin
        cd ~/docs
        svn co svn+ssh://svn/srv/svn/it-svnroot/docs/trunk

        The mkdir is needed for the process used here as the docs are all converted from OpenOffice .odt to their raw xml form. This is easier to handle by subversion since it can show the diffs clearly in this form. The ~/pl-3-bin directory is where you store your OpenOffice .odt/.ods files for working with the SVN repo of docs.
        Alternate locations for pl-3-bin

        pl-3-bin does not have to be in your ~/ . It can be anywhere as long as the BIN_DIR variable is defined in your environment. Since the pl-3-bin directory is expected to hold the OPenOffice .odt and .ods files, it can be a link to ~/Documents (the default location for these files in a RHEL desktop environment).