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Re: introductory Subversion tutorial

From: Mike Mason <mgm_at_thoughtworks.net>
Date: 2004-01-23 11:28:03 CET

Faheem Mitha wrote:

>Dear People,
>
>As part of the application for a job, I recently gave a small
>Subversion tutorial-style presentation, since the people in question
>had never used version control software, but were interested in
>learning about it. The files are here:
>
>http://www.stat.unc.edu/students/faheem/svn/svn.pdf
>
>

It looks quite interesting, but the first thing that strikes me is
there's no narrative describing what's going on -- it's basically a
shell script with some comments in it. Could you add more description of
what all the operations are? (Maybe this is unnecessary since you're
talking people through it as they go).

Machine naming is unclear -- how about "server" and "client", or
"server" and "workstation" ? It might be useful to use the full version
of Subversion commands, so "svn status" instead of the more cryptic "svn
st".

Logs are not cached locally -- if you ask for a log on a file,
Subversion will retrieve the log for the file up to the revision it's
currently at. I think what it's doing when you ask for "svn log" is
working on the current directory, which is only at revision 1, hence you
don't see the r2 log.

Your remote repository stuff significantly misses things you'd need to
explain in real life -- about different mechanisms for accessing a
repository, and why you're choosing svn+ssh. Maybe a better sequence is
setting up a repository on the server with file:// access, then
explaining how to make it available on a workstation using svn+ssh. In
fact, a networked repository is the usual thing you need, so you could
just jump straight to it. If you're pitching at people who are
unfamiliar with version control you might want to stick to svnserve,
because it's easy to use and to configure.

Cheers,
Mike.

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Received on Fri Jan 23 11:28:32 2004

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