RE: How to avoid cluttering the svn repository with several versions of compiled files

Returning to Subversion-users after time away on other projects.

There's a basic flaw in Subversion: it has no graceful way to delete old files from the repository. The result is.... painful for situations like this, where the files are bulky and will clutter your source control repository. This is fundamentally a religious issue: should a source control system allow flushing old code? Subversion is clearly built with the idea of "no".

The key is to use a separate repository, accessed with 'svn:external'. Your build or commit process can commit to that separate repository, you can use subdirectories there to prevent the binary files from being stored in the same place and retaining history, and you can scrub the material from that external repository far more easily than in a location that stores both source code and binaries.

Or, switch to a source control system that handles it differently.

> Hi, I am a newbie to SVN, and have the following question:
>
>
>
> Suppose that I am collaborating with several people on producing a book
> using LaTeX.
>
> I would like to use SVN not only for versioning the sources, but also I
> would like to have in the repository an up-to-date version of the .pdf
> (or .dvi, or .ps) compiled from these sources. The reason for that is
> that, although the pdf is recoverable from the sources, it is convenient
> for everybody to see the latest version without having to recompile the
> sources.
>
> I could compile the pdf in my working copy, and add it to the svn
> repository, but then I would be cluttering the repository with many
> versions of the pdf (for which SVN is probably not doing a good job at
> incremental diffs).
>
>
>
> Is there a way to tell SVN that the latest pdf file should *replace* the
> previous one, that is, to force deletion of the previous revisions of
> that file?
>
> Of course I could save the pdf file somewhere else, not under version
> control, but perhaps there is a way to do that inside svn?
>
> (I guess my question would also make sense for binaries compiled from
> programs, not only for Latex docs).
>
>
>
> - Marc

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Received on 2009-05-16 18:54:14 CEST