[svn.haxx.se] · SVN Dev · SVN Users · SVN Org · TSVN Dev · TSVN Users · Subclipse Dev · Subclipse Users · this month's index

Building from repository - best practices?

From: Mats Sigge <mats_at_sigge.cc>
Date: 2005-12-02 20:37:02 CET

Hello. My company is currently using Serena ChangeMan (i.e. PVCS) but we're
not very happy with it and are probably moving to Subversion. But we'd like
to know if it's possible to (sort of) keep working as we have regarding
builds.

 

Instead of building the very latest from the trunk, we use a label (or tag
if you wish) called "build". When we build our product, we check out ("get")
everything labelled "build" and build from that (and of course we also
create a label for the current build, so we can recreate it later). And when
checking in code, normally a file will be given the "build" label when it's
checked in (i.e. the label is moved to the latest version), but on occasion,
code is checked in without being labelled. Now, I can think of several
reasons why this is bad (and personally, I don't really like it) but what it
does give us is the ability to check in "(near) future" changes directly to
the trunk without branching. I.e. if I know that I'm the only developer
working on a file, and I'm fairly confident that it won't need other changes
right now, I can check in stuff which shouldn't be included in builds until
a few days ahead. Now, my question is: is this doable with Subversion? I
can't think of a simple way of using Subversion tags for this (at the very
least, we'd need a separate commit for updating the tag). Is it possible to
use a property instead, i.e. each file contains a property saying which
revision contains the "build version" of a that particular file?

 

Of course I realize that one reason for this way of working is the lack of
good merging support in PVCS, and with Subversion it's much easier (and more
efficient I'd imagine) to create short-lived branches, so the need for this
decreases. But it's always nice to at least know what your options are.

 

Cheers,

 

/ Mats

 

PS. I hope the above is at least slightly understandable.
Received on Fri Dec 2 21:21:13 2005

This is an archived mail posted to the Subversion Users mailing list.

This site is subject to the Apache Privacy Policy and the Apache Public Forum Archive Policy.