I prefer to do all of my Subversion work from the command line, but I realize that not all people are like me. Clarissa and I have been using a wiki to keep track of most of our shared information (including our wedding preparations), but our wiki does not work well for content like spreadsheets. Therefore, I decided to try out a Subversion repository. After some initial searching for graphical clients, I found ZigVersion. It is a simple graphical Subversion client for Mac OS X. It took a little bit to explain how it worked and how to use it to Clarissa, but now we have been sharing and editing non-wiki-friendly files for a few weeks.
Category: Subversion
svn switch
I’ve struggled with this command for a while. It should let me change the URL of a directory in a repository, but I’ve never had any luck. It turns out it wasn’t so hard. Running “svn info” shows the current URL and that it ends in “cosc170”.
zlund@kastria:~/compilers$ svn info Path: . URL: svn+ssh://dakara/home/zac/repositories/marquette/cosc170 Repository Root: svn+ssh://dakara/home/zac/repositories/marquette Repository UUID: e0bd8123-bfd5-445b-929b-77a6dd82f418 Revision: 29 Node Kind: directory Schedule: normal Last Changed Author: zac Last Changed Rev: 27 Last Changed Date: 2009-01-31 15:06:57 -0600 (Sat, 31 Jan 2009)
I want to change “cosc170” to “cosc/170” because I already made this change in the repository and the URL is out of date on this working copy. Therefore, I type “svn switch” followed by the new URL and then a “.” to specify the current directory.
zlund@kastria:~/compilers$ svn switch svn+ssh://dakara/home/zac/repositories/marquette/cosc/170 . At revision 36.
It updates the URL and the working copy. Now a “svn info” shows the correct URL and the updated revision number.
zlund@kastria:~/compilers$ svn info Path: . URL: svn+ssh://dakara/home/zac/repositories/marquette/cosc/170 Repository Root: svn+ssh://dakara/home/zac/repositories/marquette Repository UUID: e0bd8123-bfd5-445b-929b-77a6dd82f418 Revision: 36 Node Kind: directory Schedule: normal Last Changed Author: zac Last Changed Rev: 33 Last Changed Date: 2009-03-09 23:18:47 -0500 (Mon, 09 Mar 2009)
When the directory structure of a repository changes, it isn’t necessary to check out a new copy. The existing working copy can be updated to reflect the change to the repository.