Subversion hackery

sam — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:47:07 +0000

In preparation from some git experimentation, I just converted one subversion repository with a layout like this:

repo/
repo/example_dragdrop
repo/dedup

Into two separate repositories, each named after their respective project, containing a trunk/ folder with all the content. Here is what I did:

svnadmin dump repo > repo.dump

I had previously done a lot of moving crap around inside this repo that svndumpfilter objected to vehemently, so I edited repo.dump, found those revisions (look for lines starting ^Revision-number:) and deleted them.

Then I could use svndumpfilter to pull the separate projects out of the dump:

cat repo.dump | svndumpfilter --drop-empty-revs --renumber-revs include example_dragdrop > example_dragdrop.dump
 
cat repo.dump | svndumpfilter --drop-empty-revs --renumber-revs include dedup > dedup.dump

I then editted these new dump files to change the name of the top folder from dedup/ and example_dragdrop/ respectively, to trunk/. To do this was mostly a global exchange of /^Node-path: example_dragdrop/ to /Node-path: trunk/. Dedup required an additional step as there were additional renames within the repo. This required the updating of lines starting /^Node-copyfrom-path:/.

Once this was done, new repos could be created:

svnadmin create example_dragdrop ; svnadmin load example_dragdrop < example_dragdrop.dump
 
svnadmin create dedup ; svnadmin load dedup < dedup.dump

And that was pretty much it.

Subversion ignore for Rails applications

sam — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:21:40 +0000

Files in subversion workspaces can be ignored using the command:

svn propset svn:ignore <pattern> <folder>

Note however that properties do not stack! If you execute the following:

svn propset svn:ignore "*.sqlite3" db
svn propset svn:ignore "schema.rb" db

then the second ignore statement will overwrite the first. To ignore multiple files, you must provide a newline separated list; The most straightforward way to do this is to create a file, e.g. ignores.txt

*.sqlite3
schema.rb

then provide this to subversion:

svn propset svn:ignore -F ignores.txt db

However if you know what you are doing you can do this on one line. Using bash on Mac OS, typing Ctrl-V Ctrl-M will insert a newline into a string. Putting in a \n, or just typing \ and then hitting enter, does not work.

There is also a way to set global ignores in subversion. Edit you ~/.subversion/config file and add a global-ignores line:

global-ignores = *.o *.lo *.la #*# .*.rej *.rej .*~ *~ .#* .DS_Store

So given these ground rules, here is my ignore regimen for Rails:

.DS_Store files are generated by the Mac OS X Finder, and therefore as they are platform specific, we should let the user responsible for the platform take care of them using global ignores statement shown above.
Files which are going to be generated by ALL developers should be ignored by the repository itself, using svn propset svn:ignore.
Ignore log files, sqlite3 databases, temporary files.
The db/schema.rb file is questionable. You can use it to recreate your database in one step, and it should only change when you alter a migration. However in practice it seemed like it used to change a lot more often than that (like when you ran a migration), so was a pain to version. It looks like that is fixed now, so let’s keep it.
For applications deployed in multiple places and for which the subversion repository is not secure, ignore database.yml

So here is my working set of svn commands:

svn propset svn:ignore "*.sqlite3" db
svn propset svn:ignore "*.log" log
svn propset svn:ignore "*" tmp/sessions tmp/cache tmp/sockets

References:

Howto User Rails With Subversion

Preparing a Rails Application for SVN (global-ignore)

How to … Make Subversion ignore files and folders (svn -F option)

Sam Pierson's Blog » subversion

Subversion hackery

Subversion ignore for Rails applications