Thanks for that Ryan!
Best,
Mike
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ryan Schmidt [mailto:subversion-2008b_at_ryandesign.com]
> Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 1:40 AM
> To: Caplan, Michael
> Cc: users_at_subversion.tigris.org
> Subject: Re: Switch and File Modification in Atomic Manner?
>
> On Jun 22, 2008, at 2:29 PM, Michael Caplan wrote:
>
> > I'm looking for some information on how the switch command actually
> > goes about
> > updating files. Basically, I'm looking at using SVN and switch in
> > order to
> > update code in a sandbox on a website. The concern is serving up
> > half written
> > files while the switch command is running.
> >
> > Does "switch" replace the files in an atomic manner on the file
> > system so that
> > half written files are not served?
> >
> > The PHP APC docs explain the issue best:
> >
> > "When you modify a file on a live web server you really should do
> > so in an
> > atomic manner. That is, write to a temporary file and rename (mv)
> > the file into
> > its permanent position when it is ready. Many text editors, cp, tar
> > and other
> > such programs don't do this. This means that there is a chance that
> > a file is
> > accessed (and cached) while it is still being written to. ... The
> > unfortunate
> > person who accessed this half-written file will still see
> > weirdness... " -
> > http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/apc.configuration.php
> >
> > I looked at the SVN docs and can't find any details on the method
> > used to update
> > files when running switch.
>
> svn switch, like its lesser cousin svn update, is not atomic.
>
> What we did for our web sites was to have a working copy of the web
> site files on the web site server, but not point Apache at that. We
> would svn switch that working copy to whatever new tag we wanted to
> use on the web site server, and once the switch was completed, we
> would svn export the working copy to a new directory whose name was
> based on the tag name. Then we would remove a symlink "current" and
> repoint it at the new export. Apache's docroot was pointed at that
> current symlink. That way it's a nearly-atomic operation to remove
> and recreate the symlink -- there's only a split second during which
> the symlink doesn't exist -- and should you need to return to the
> previous version of the site for some reason, it's just as simple to
> change the symlink back to your previous export. Keep a few previous
> version around, and delete older ones. We had a script we used to
> deploy to the server which automated all this.
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Received on 2008-06-23 17:26:23 CEST