RE: GUI Diff on Repository HEAD and "a" directory?

Mark,

Thanks.

VSS's Diff program appears to be built into the client GUI (when I run it I
don't see any separate EXE's in my task list for it). When you do a Diff,
for each file/directory you want to compare you first decided if the source
is a file system source or a repository source. I find this feature VERY
handy. However, as you said, over a WAN the performance can be less than
ideal.. I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too. I can envision
creating some batch files or something that might make it easy enough to
utilize the export feature you mentioned just prior to performing an actual
Diff so that to the end user they don't really know the difference. However,
I again may be coming at this the wrong way.. Maybe what I should do is
implement some hook scripts that always export the contents of a directory
from the repository to some shared location anytime the contents of that
directory change. This would give me a place to always do my "Diff" against,
but also give the added advantage of have a constant backup of the latest
version of all source outside of the repo. Database, which is something I
was interested in having anyway.. Are there any canned scripts for such
hooks available anywhere?

Where is the documentation for configuring the Apache server to server the
SVN repo? Currently I'm just using SVNServe

Regards,

Tom Malia

  _____

From: Mark Phippard [mailto:markphip@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2007 10:02 AM
To: Tom Malia
Cc: Subversion Users mailing list
Subject: Re: GUI Diff on Repository HEAD and "a" directory?

On 3/18/07, Tom Malia <tommalia@ttdsinc.com> wrote:

Maybe I'm coming at this the wrong way. Is there a way to treat a subversion
repository like any other directory in a file system? If I can do that,
then I should be able to use any Diff tool that supports standard directory
comparisons and point it at the Subversion repository directory for one of
the sources and my "working" folder for the other. In scanning the posts to
this forum, it looks like there is something that might let me do this?
WebDav or something? If so, what's the bare minimum I would need to get
this functional? Can I only do this if I use the Apache server to serve up
the SVN repo?

You need to be careful to select Reply to All with this mailing list so that
the list is cc:ed.

Generally, I would say the answer to your question is no. I do not recall
VSS having this feature either, but I have not used it in years. VSS might
have its own diff command that can do what you want, but I do not recall
being able to treat a VSS repository like a file system.

Subversion with WebDAV could potentially do this. But I think you would
need a third party tool like WebDrive that lets you mount a WebDAV
repository as a drive letter. And yes this all requires using the Apache
server option. I think the performance would be pretty bad for something
like this and I would not recommend it.

Subversion does have the export command which will let you export a tree
into a set of "vanilla" folders. You could then diff the export with the
file system that you wanted to compare against.

-- 
Thanks
Mark Phippard
http://markphip.blogspot.com/