SVN Page

Catherine suggested that we put all the bits and pieces we learn about SVN in one place. A jolly good idea as I do tend to forget about things!

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As a CVS user, migrating to SVN was not without it's hiccoughs. Let's begin with some technical details:

Setting up your SVN details

(1) If you've got an account on the SVN server at WWMM, you should have a certificate file need by SVN to authenticate a session. Let's call this file svn_cert.p12. Place it in a convenient place, say, $HOME/certificates/

(2) Now edit the file $HOME/.subversion/servers It should contain the lines:

[groups]
wwmm = wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk
                                                                                
[wwmm]
ssl-client-cert-file = $HOME/certificates/svn_cert.p12
ssl-client-cert-password = <the password Catherine gave you>

I'm not sure if you have to put your password there, but if you do, SVN won't prompt you for a password each time you try to use it.

(3) I found it convenient to define an environment variable pointing to my SVN directory on the WWMM server:

SVN=https://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/svn/users/am592
export SVN

You could just add those lines to your .bashrc file.

Now you are set.

Creating a Project

There seem to be a couple of ways of doing this. The method reccommended by the SVN book (Version Control with Subversion - O'Reilly) is to use svnadmin create. This won't work as none of us users have access to the svnadmin command. The following works quite well:

$ svn mkdir $SVN/project1

This will create directory project1 in the repository. The svn mkdir command can also be used to make a directory in your working copy, but more on this later.

Now your project has its own directory on the SVN server. Let's get the files into it.

$ ls my_code
a.f90  b.f90
$ svn import my_code $SVN/project1
Adding     my_code/a.f90
Adding     my_code/b.f90
Committed revision 1.

That's done. Notice that the project is called my_code in my directory but project1 on the server. The names could be the same.