Subversion

Legacy: This article describes a concept that has been superseded in the course of ongoing development on the Organic Design wiki. Please do not develop this any further or base work on this concept, this is only useful for a historic record of work done. You may find a link to the currently used concept or function in this article, if not you can contact the author to find out what has taken the place of this legacy item.

MediaWiki's SVN uses SSH public key so you don't need a password, so you'll need to supply your ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub file to the person setting up your commit access (if that files doesn't exist, run ssh-keygen from non-root shell using blank passwd when prompted, see this link for details). Also, you need to set up your auto-props. Note also that the commit's are automatically shown on the #mediawiki IRC channel (see freenode FAQ re registering a nickname etc) so it's good to have that open when working on the MediaWiki code.

The WikiMedia repository

See MW:Subversion for details about using MediaWikis SVN. Here's some examples showing retrieval of the current version of the code-base, the current version of an extension, and a version of an extension for MediaWiki 1.16 respectively.

svn co http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/phase3

svn co http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/TreeAndMenu

svn co http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/REL1_16/extensions/TreeAndMenu

Usage

The most important command to know is how to get help;

svn help
svn help checkout # Help on check(ing)out project to CLIENT copy
svn help commmit  # Help on commit(ting) changes to SERVER

To obtain a log of the changes made in a svn project;

svn log -v http://[PATH TO SERVER SVN PROJECT]

Or to get changes between a certain date range in a local repo;

svn log -r {2012-02-10}:{2012-02-15}

To create a new repository on the server ready for importing a directory of files;

cd /tmp
mkdir SERVER
svnadmin create /tmp/SERVER/newrepos

This creates a concise database directory for the new repository on the SERVER in the directory called /tmp/SERVER;

ls -l /tmp/SERVER/newrepos
total 16
-rw-r--r--    1 User  wheel  379 Apr  3 13:58 README.txt
drwxr-xr-x    4 User  wheel  136 Apr  3 13:58 conf
drwxr-xr-x    2 User  wheel   68 Apr  3 13:58 dav
drwxr-xr-x   10 User  wheel  340 Apr  3 13:58 db
-r--r--r--    1 User  wheel    2 Apr  3 13:58 format
drwxr-xr-x   11 User  wheel  374 Apr  3 13:58 hooks
drwxr-xr-x    4 User  wheel  136 Apr  3 13:58 locks

Create an example directory for upload;

cd /tmp
mkdir MYTREE
echo '#!/usr/bin/perl -w\nprint "hello world";' > /tmp/MYTREE/helloWorld.pl
svn import /tmp/MYTREE file:///tmp/SERVER/newrepos/some/project

Listing the contents in the repository directory path;

svn list file:///tmp/SERVER/newrepos/some/project

To make a local copy you need to use the checkout command. This creates a new directory (default called newrepos) which is a local copy of newrepos.

mkdir CLIENT
cd CLIENT
svn co file:///tmp/SERVER/newrepos/some/project/  # fetches project/test.pl
svn co file:///tmp/SERVER/newrepos/some/          # fetches some/project/test.pl
rm -rf /tmp/CLIENT  
svn co file:///tmp/SERVER/newrepos/some/project/ /tmp/CLIENT # Creates CLIENT dir

Note: The directory the svn command is run in determines where the local checkout directories and files will end up.

Now that you have created a local copy all work should be conducted within it. There is a hidden directory called .svn which contains all the information required for the svn framework;

cd /tmp/CLIENT # Work in the local copy of svn

To update a file on your CLIENT directory;

cd /tmp/CLIENT
svn update # "." is updated 
cd /tmp
svn update /tmp/CLIENT # Specifying path

To add a new file to the local svn copy, first make a new file within the directory structure;

cd /tmp/CLIENT
echo '#!/usr/bin/perl -w\nprint qq(hello world!);' > /tmp/CLIENT/helloWorld2.pl
svn add helloWorld2.pl

The status command will identify differences between the CLIENT copy and the SERVER copy of the repoistory;

svn status /tmp/CLIENT

The following list provides the details of svn status output;

L      abc.c               # svn has a lock in its .svn directory for abc.c
M      bar.c               # the content in bar.c has local modifications
M      baz.c               # baz.c has property but no content modifications
X      3rd_party           # this dir is part of an externals definition
?      foo.o               # svn doesn't manage foo.o
!      some_dir            # svn manages this, but it's either missing or incomplete
~      qux                 # versioned as file/dir/link, but type has changed
I      .screenrc           # svn doesn't manage this, and is configured to ignore it
A  +   moved_dir           # added with history of where it came from
M  +   moved_dir/README    # added with history and has local modifications
D      stuff/fish.c        # this file is scheduled for deletion
A      stuff/loot/bloo.h   # this file is scheduled for addition
C      stuff/loot/lump.c   # this file has conflicts from an update
R      xyz.c               # this file is scheduled for replacement
S      stuff/squawk        # this file or dir has been switched to a branch

Problems

When attempting to import the /var/www structure into the /var/svn/www repository it bailed after coming across a filename containing special characters with the following fatal error:

svn: Can't convert string from native encoding to 'UTF-8':
svn: A?\195?\164o?\195?\188.gif

SVN GUI's

• WebSVN
• Linux: kdesvn - and many others
• Windows: tortoisesvn
• Macos: svnx

See also

• Configure SVN - our procedure for setting up SVN and WebSVN on our servers
• MediaWiki SVN Statistics
• Subversion cheatsheet
• Subversion book
• CodeSwarm - renders video's of subversion repository activity
• Changing the username of a revision