Re: Few questions on Subversion

[Duncan Murdoch <mu...@stats.uwo.ca>]

On 5/31/2006 7:56 AM, Lee Sherry wrote:
> Hello users,
> 
> I have a few questions regarding subversion. I have a repository set
> up on a linux machine, and use it as a central repository for company
> files, Word / Excel / PDF and more.
> 
> Me and my colleagues use TortoiseSVN to keep updated with each others
> changes etc.
> 
> 1. As the repo gets larger is there a way to skip having to download
> all the files into your working copy? i.e copy initial files from a cd
> backup, to save new users from having to do a large download?

You can check out any subdirectory of the repository, you don't need to 
check out the whole thing.  You should organize your projects into 
separate subdirectories.
> 
> 2. What is the best way to deal with files such as THUMBS.DB that XP
> seems to create and modify, thus making your working copy almost
> constantly out of date?

Don't commit them.  If you have already committed them, then remove them 
from the current version in the repository, and recreate them afterwards 
but leave them unversioned.

Generally you don't want to commit files that are created automatically 
by programs, you only want to commit files if there is some 
human-generated content in them that you want to preserve.  An exception 
might be if you absolutely want to be sure that the automatically 
created content is preserved, because you're worried the programs that 
create it might not work next year when you want to look back at this 
year's copy.
> 
> 3. As the repo gets larger, is there a way to flatten the versions,
> i.e remove all but the head version, to trim on space?

You could create a new repository each year (or for each project), and 
toss out the old ones when you are no longer interested in the projects 
in them.

You could also export the whole repository then import it into a new 
repository.  Remember that this loses the entire history, and may lose 
property settings on some files if you've used those.  If it makes sense 
to do this, then Subversion might not be the right tool for you.  There 
are other mirroring tools if you don't care about maintaining the  history.

> 
> Any hints on the above questions would be very helpfull.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> 
> 
> Lee
> 
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