Subversion Repository Experience

So for this post I will blogging about my experience setting up a subversion repository for my CS 360 (Software Engineering) class. We are setting these repositories up for future work in the class (will definitely be talked about in later posts) and setting up this software itself is a learning experience.

In the past, I worked with Git under the brands of GitHub and BitBucket, and Subversion (SVN) has me missing them. I have done a little work with Git repositories at the command line, but, typically, I used a GUI for all those troubles because the GUIs make dealing with these version control systems really simplistic (the specific GUI I used back then can be obtained by using the "sudo apt-get install git-gui" command from any flavor of linux platform). The only issue that I ever had with those GUIs were the merge tools that they provided. There are other tools for that, though, and that is beside the point here.

SVN confused me at first because I'm using Linux Mint as my system. I read a few things from Mint support sites and Stack Overflow that Mint has had issues with SVN for a few of its releases. Luckily, 15 (Olivia) was not of that nature. From that point, it was smooth sailing to install SVN. Cloning the class repository was also straightforward and was easy to do with just a few commands. The only thing that threw me for a loop was when I noticed a lack of the description of the "pull" command from the introduction I was reading. Typically, I've found, committing a change is not enough to expose your results to the web. With SVN, it seems, that committing is the final step (and detailing the commit is just as easy) to the entire process. I want to read into what implications this has for merging files for future reference. This is because with the git programs in which I am familiar, you have to conduct a commit and then do a merge before doing a final push to expose your changes to the web.

All in all, setting up the repository was a good learning experience because I now know how to use another file version control system. The difficulties were minor in that this experience was not one meant to cause too much trouble.

Here is a link to the repository.

Music listened to while setting up repository and blogging: 50 Cent, Ozzy Osbourne, & Wale