Created a branch in my main repository yesterday after running trials on a sample repository. Things snapped into focus after reading Key Concepts Behind Branches from the SVN book, which reinforces the point that Subversion is a versioned file system, and a branch conceptually is merely a copy.

svn copy http://localhost/svn/ll/trunk http://localhost/svn/ll/branches/gui
cd wkgDirectory
svn switch http://localhost/svn/ll/branches/gui

Everything worked as advertised and the copy added only 5% to the repository size, since files aren’t duplicated until a modification is committed. The documentation says that individual directories and even files can be switched. Directories worked but individual files turned into working directories?

I’ve used Subversion for all of a week and already like it better than CVS. It took weeks to get comfortable with CVS commands, and I needed to constantly relearn them. SVN commands come to mind quite naturally already.

I’m up and running under Subversion and am declaring the conversion from CVS as complete.

Tried to connect to my SVN WebDAV folder from Windows XP, both from Add Network Place and using FrontPage. FrontPage worked first try and was able to download the repository. To upload, I need a dav_fs filesystem, not dav_svn.

Add Network Place failed as described in a Caltech web page found with Google(Windows XP WebDAV folder apache). I will leave this until a WinXP process actually needs to connect.

Adding Basic Authentication

As detailed on 14 Nov, the lack of httpd authentication prevents svn updates from getting an author assigned. So now I’m installing authentication per the Subversion instructions:

• htpasswd2 -cm /etc/apache2/basicHTTPpasswd bozzie
• Cut & pasted the Auth{Type,Name,User} directives from the instructions into the <Location> /svn section of my default-server.conf file. Cut & pasted the Require valid-user only for write actions, also from the instructions.

Re-created the repository and imported. The import challenged for a password and the newly checked-in revision finally has an author.

SVN is ready for use, I think.

ViewCVS (ViewVC)

SuSE installs this package in /srv/viewcvs. Finally found some installation instructions by downloading the current version from the Tigris web site and ad-libbing from the viewVC instructions.

Summary of mods to default-server.conf:

• Alias /viewcvs-docroot /srv/viewcvs/templates/docroot
• ScriptAlias /viewcvs /srv/viewcvs/www/cgi/viewcvs.cgi
• Plus viewcvs.conf must be edited.

ViewCVS presents a serviceable graphic interface to SVN, which I imagine is even better in the current viewVC version. There is also a graphing interface of some sort that I haven’t looked into yet.

Trouble with $Id: sdogWP-X10.sql,v 1.4 2014/11/18 06:10:40 tguthrie Exp tguthrie $ and related keyword properties solved after finding a “How to get keywords to work” search result and learing that while double-quotes are required when using svn propset, they must not be used in the config file.

Next, the output of svn diff is a non-standard format, apparently used for creating patch files. I specified /usr/bin/diff via the .subversion/config diff-cmd option. No change! Finally discovered that svn diff passes a “-u” argument to diff, resulting in a non-default report format. Wrote a Perl wrapper to substitute the –normal option and call this wrapper via my .subversion config entry. Finally, the svn diff output now looks like a normal diff command.

Next, the SVN log says “(no author)” for files imported using Apache. I finally found the answer in the svn FAQ:

“If you allow anonymous write access to the repository via Apache, the Apache server never challenges the SVN client for a username, and instead permits the write operation without authentication. Since Subversion has no idea who did the operation, this results in a log like this (no author).”

So now I will add authentication.