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Re: Moving from VSS to SVN - with Web based Shared Working Copies

From: Ryan Schmidt <subversion-2008c_at_ryandesign.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:47:59 -0500

On Aug 21, 2008, at 05:03, <c.jones_at_rgu.ac.uk> <c.jones_at_rgu.ac.uk>
wrote:

> We are just at the beginning of trying to move from VSS to SVN.
> We've got our shiny SVN server all set up and running, but now it's
> the practical changes that are causing us the headache. We're
> trying to figure out how to move from VSS to SVN from our existing
> setup.
>
> Currently we develop web applications using a shared development
> server, so in VSS files are 'checked out' to a developer, edited
> directly on the DEV shared area, run there while developing and
> then checked in. Other developers can obviously see that those
> files are being changed so must avoid them.
>
> If we move to SVN in this scenario, we have the obvious problem
> that you can't really have more than one person changing the shared
> working copy at once - it defeats the whole copy-modify-merge thing.
>
> The obvious thing is to develop on a local working copy, however
> this has it's own headache - how on earth do you replicate a huge
> development server, the databases, application server
> configurations, interconnections with other systems, etc., for each
> developer on a standalone machine?
>
> This must be an issue for anyone developing web based applications,
> so how do people deal with it out there? Any pointers, sites
> discussing this or anything at all would be great!
>
> Our problem at the moment is the whole change to SVN seems
> insurmountable because of this, and it's difficult to see any
> incremental steps that we could take to get there. Clearly we
> can't take three months out of 'ordinary work', just to completely
> revamp our entire development process and environment, so we need
> to somehow manage this is smaller stages.

At the web programming company where I worked, we didn't migrate from
VSS to SVN -- we migrated from nothing to SVN. :) As in your
situation, everyone was editing a shared "working copy" on the
development server, except that we had no safeguards to ensure two
developers weren't trying to work on the same file. Awful.

We also didn't want to replicate the development server environment
on each developer's workstation, especially since the server was
Linux and the workstations were Windows. We settled on keeping each
developers' working copies in their public_html folder in their home
directory on the Linux server, which developers would access via
Samba and manipulate using TortoiseSVN. There was a little bit of
work to rewrite our projects so they could run from an arbitrary
server-side directory, but after that this strategy worked nicely.

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Received on 2008-08-21 20:48:27 CEST

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