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. 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:

TortoiseSVN - an open-source GUI front-end for Windows; this is the program we have experience with on Windows. (home page, Wikipedia page)
Versions.app - a Mac only, commercial client (home page)
RapidSVN - a multi-platform, open-source GUI front-end (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!

Use svn on the command line

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:

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... 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:

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 FILE
Change the commit message for a specific revision: svn propedit svn:log --revprop -r REV FILE
This will bring up the existing log text for the specified revision in your default editor (typically Emacs), where you can edit and change it as you want. This is useful if you accidentally committed some changes with an empty or uninformative log message.
Compare your modified file to the version in the repository: svn diff FILE
Compare some earlier versions, say here versions 123 and 120: svn diff -r 123:120 FILE
Undo your local changes (ie revert to the repository status): svn revert FILE
Resolve Conflicts (Merge Others' Changes): svn update
svn resolved
Commit your changes: svn ci -m "Your description of the changes here." FILE
(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:

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

Daily routines

Update in the morning, and allways before you 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 several times a day.
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.

What do I write in the log message

The best way to learn to write good log messages is to read other log messages. Pick a file (e.g. twol-sme.txt, sme-lex.fst), and read the log (the command is svn log filename | less). If the log message tells you what you want to know, then it is a good log message.

In svn it is possible to edit and correct bad log messages. See the list of useful commands above for how to do this.