RE: Managing Product templates

> We are currently branching into Subversion usage operating with VisualSVN
> Server (will upgrade to Enterprise when trials are complete) and a client
> side using TortoiseSVN. In general all very happy and things are all
> pretty seamless and obvious, but...
>
> I would like to introduce the concept of a "product" directory template
> that would be resident in each of our repositories. I guess at this point
> I should say that we are probably going to operate with multiple
> repositories where a repository is set up for each of our main "Projects".
> Then inside each of our repositories we would have many "products", each
> hopefully having a structure generated from our template. The reason I
> think we will operate in this fashion is because we will need to apply
> specific user security access rights to the "projects" and I am told by
> our IT administrators that this would be the simplest way of achieving
> this. Open to pointers on this too.

Well... I'm not sure it would be any easier to manage security by repository for each project than by path. Of course, it depends. If they are thinking that security would be managed at the file system level then sure. But, if you are using path based authorization built into svn then I don't see a difference.

> I have managed to create the template structure (applying desired
> properties to the structure such as ignore patterns and logminsize etc)
> and then create new "products" in a repository based on the template....
> simple copy function in a Tortoise repo-browser, not really rocket
> science..
>
> But I am struggling to find a way of say importing this template into
> another repository and identify a mechanism, however manual, of keeping
> them in sync. I am trying to achieve as much as possible from a client
> interface as in general we do not have simple access to personnel with
> server access rights.

Well... once your product is set up... I think any changes you want to make to the structure will have to be done manually to that product.

You can create a template in a repository and then dump it to a dump file. Whenever you want to create a new product you can load the dump file into a repository at a specific path. Of course, this will require access to the server. Or it could be set up as a script with a web front end of some type.

You can also create a script that creates your structure imports it into svn, sets the properties, etc. This script can run on any client that has svn.exe on it.

Once again, it is the sync piece that I really don't see a way to do once that product structure is already in place. Whether you use seperate repos or a single repo that has your defaults structure that is only there to copy to create new products.

You could TRY to change the product template then merge it into each product. But frankly you would probably get a bunch of tree conflicts since those are the types of changes svn is very bad at merging in.

> I apologise if this is the wrong place to post this query but my web
> searching has not really managed to help so far I would appreciate any
> guidance, even if it is a pointer to another place to ask the question.
>

Yea... I think you're in the right place... and it is a refreshing change from the daily why do I have all these mergeinfo properties question. ;)

BOb
Received on 2010-05-19 19:32:21 CEST