Dumb newby question: moving from RCS

I'm transitioning from decades of using RCS to TortoiseSVN and I'm having a hard time getting my head around it all... The main problem is that I need a *lot* less than SVN wants to do, and I'm trying to figure out how to make SVN do _little_ enough to meet my [minimal] needs.

Note, too, that virtually everything I'm doing is in Perl, and so I don't bother with makefiles, and I don't need to make "executables" that are compiled into some other directory eventually to produce executables. Where the "source code" lives is where I do my work, directly.

Also, there's "just me", so no need for merges or parallel development or any of that kind of stuff. What I've always done in the past is created a directory to hold all of the files associated with a project, made an "RCS" directory in there and everything to do with the project is all nice and tidy and in one place [I do most everything in Perl, so the .pl's, the doc files, config files, even the data files [e.g., using sqlite] are all in one place]. Since the version stuff in RCS is manual, and by file, I have control over which of the files in the project directory are locked/checkedin/revisioned and which are/canbe just ignored.

And so my dumb questions:

1) can I put the repository for a project *IN* the project directory [ala './RCS'?]. I can deal with having an extraneous level of directories if necessary [e.g., PROJECT then PROJECT/SVN and PROJECT/PROJECT, if I have to], but it'd be nice not to.

2) Can SVN work in "lock" mode, as RCS did? I really don't want to make parallel hierarchies and copy things over when I want to work on something [especially since there'll be a bunch of other files in the project directory *NOT* being revisions [config, data, notes, etc] and I'd need most of those copied to get a working "paralleL' development directory -- I'm quite confortable going into the "master" directory, "locking" one of the source files, working away in place, then doing a "ci -u" when I'm done, so the 'master' directory always has read-only copies of the stable stuff and might have a writeable copy of a file or two I was working on and may have another bunch of read-only or read-write files that shouldn't be of any concern to SVN.

3) I'd like something like "$ID: $" -- I saw something in the docs [like on page 130..:o)] about svn:keywords but I didn't quite understand what I'd need to do... surely it must be easy to have a program know its own version? [I realize this is different in the SVN world: in my [old] world, *files* had revisions and it was easy for RCS to update the magic keywords as it checked out the file, and now *projects* do... and that's fine, but still I'd like to be able to put the version # into the 'herald' when the pgm starts up, etc. I guess the tricky part with SVN is that if I use the version # in file A and I edit and "commit" file B, *something* would have to know to go back, as part of the commit, to "fix" file A to have the project revion # updated.

Thanks for your patience!!!

  /Bernie\

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Received on 2009-01-19 19:57:33 CET