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Re: Multiple projects on one system?

From: Ryan Schmidt <subversion-2005_at_ryandesign.com>
Date: 2005-11-28 18:42:02 CET

On Nov 28, 2005, at 17:36, Hal Vaughan wrote:

> Is this easily workable one one computer -- to have 4 projects
> stored in
> Subversion, and all 4 kept separate?

Subversion has no concept of "projects." It's just a versioned file
system. If you'd like to have one filesystem (repository) with
multiple projects (directories) in it, then that's fine. Many people
do that. We do that at my company, where we have 10 developers
working on dozens of different projects. It certainly makes it easy
to back up (there's one thing to back up, not N) and it also makes it
easy to know what someone's talking about when they say "revision 42"—
clearly, that means revision 42 of *the* repository. If there were
multpile repositories, one would have to know revision 42 of which
one? If you want to use one project as the basis for another, it's
very easy to svn cp a project to a new folder, then make changes.
History is preserved so you can later see where it came from, which
you couldn't if you exported the project from one repository and
imported it into another.

Many other people like keeping separate projects in separate
repositories. There are many arguments for this. If you decide a
project is no longer interesting and will be deleted, you can simply
delete the repository and it's completely gone. If everything were in
a single repository, the "deleted" project would still be in the
repository's history. We are not worried about the integrity of the
Subversion repository; we have confidence in FSFS. For those who are
less confident, it's reassuring that, if something goes wrong, it
goes wrong to one project at a time, not to all projects at once.
Some people also don't like the idea of the repository revision
number increasing in all projects at the same time. "When I last
changed this project two months ago, iti was revision 42. Today's
change was revision 242. What's with the other 200 revisions?" If
you're one of those people, multiple repositories are an option.

In the end you must decide if you want a single repository or
multiple repositories. You can change your mind later, either way:
you can split one large repository into multiple smaller ones by svn
dumping the large one and loading selected parts of the dump into new
repositories using svndumpfilter. Or you can combine multiple small
repositories into a single large one using svn dump and svn load. The
latter is a slight problem in that the dates in the new large
repository are not in order, which means you cannot use date
searching, except that someone has recently written a script which
can be used to import the separate dumpfiles correctly, eliminating
this drawback. The script should be around here somewhere, I just
can't remember what it's called at the moment.

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Received on Mon Nov 28 19:21:07 2005

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