svnTalk.com

I ran into a problem today with the way we've been doing things at work. Our repository is checked out in two places: a live server, and a devel server. The devel server is updated to HEAD, the live is not. The live has been spot updated to update things like css changes and such that need to go out immediately. This caused a problem when we needed to roll out some major changes to the live site and could not just 'svn up' because some of these changes require database modifications as well that need tested.

I ran into a situation a while ago that I thought I would share with everyone. It has to deal with doing backups of repositories to share with coworkers, friends or project participants. You see, many times I will create a CD or DVD of a large project and disburse that to those that are working on a project. This helps to reduct the time, and server bandwidth, that is required to checkout a project for the very first time. Well, there was one situation where I had given a project CD to a coworker and after copying the checkout from the CD to his local, he was unable to do an update.

I am in the process of creating a new repository and thought I would document my steps. This may help some of you build a repository of your very own. All you need is a Linux Server with subversion installed. Of course, Linux is not necessary, but that is what my installation uses. Also, the steps below are the steps that I have taken and some of you may have a more "streamlined" process since there is always more than one way to skin a cat. If so, please post a comment and help me out with my way of building a repository.

Steps to Creating a Repository:

For those of you who use subversion on the Mac OS X system, there has been significant activity on the SCPlugin project. A new development team has been established for it's advancement and a new version released. Please check them out and give your support!

If I had to pick my two favorite website applications my decision would be easy. Subversion, of course, hence the svnTalk.com website and the other would be the content management system known as Drupal. Put them both together and it is like chocolate and peanut butter working together in a delicious mix of flavors, living in sweet harmony.

I recently switched to the Mac platform by getting myself a beautiful MacBook Pro 15", and boy do I love it. But there were a few learning curves in the switch, and being that I use subversion everyday, this was one I had to learn about real quickly.

I found today that after checking out a new, very large repository, my hard drive started to clatter a lot. I then checked my processes in my Windows Task Manager, using TortoiseSVN and found the process TSVNCache.exe was using quite a bit of CPU and Memory. That then lead me to investigate what this process was doing and what I could do in order to stop it.