From CVS to Subversion

2004 Dec 6 at 05:23 » Tagged as :

I have been threatening to adapt subversion for a long long time. Finally I have taken the plunge by placing this site into a subversion repository. What stuck me immediately was the fact that the size of the folder seems to have more than doubled after checking out. The increase with CVS is not so bad.

It would seem that I have not correctly specified the path names because the checkout placed the files one folder deeper than I intended. Of course it's a simple matter to move it, but I tried to figure out how it can be moved with in the repository itself since that can become useful later on. You can move files with in the repository with the svn move command but it does not accept wildcards. So try someting like this:

for i in `ls`; do svn move $i .. -m'Imported to wrong folder'; done

You need to follow it up with a commit, it does lead to a slight swelling in the size of the repository but storage is cheap (even though my hard disks keep failing)

I was by now fooled into a false sense of security and tried to import a few other sites into svn repository as well. This time the files were placed one folder higher up than I intended. By now I had discovered a simple remedy to all ills that effect the repository: rm /var/subversion -rf, don't try this at office though.

That rm command doesn't uninstall subversion but just cleans out the repository so that you can start a fresh, after a couple of fresh starts I did figure it out but not before realizing that new fsfs system - where the data is stored on flat files is superior (at least on this course) than the old BDB system. So another rm, svnadmin create followed by svn import and svn checkout sequence followed.

In the meantime, I came to realize the the svn propset command syntax is not accurately described in the manual or I am too stupid to understand it so the only way for me to mark files to be ignored was to edit the ~/.subversion/config file.

So to cut a long story short, I have finally 'got into' subversion as I have been threatening to do for a long time. A long time may pass again before i reach a conclusion as to which is better - subversion or CVS.