Subversion

Our assignment was to experiment with Subversion. Although I do not have any prior experience with Subversion, we do use version tracking software where I intern.

I began with installing Subversion on my Ubuntu machine. This was very easy, 'get-apt install subversion' does the trick. Although when doing so, I received a message stating I am using the most current version. I do not recall installing this previously but I must have, unless it came packaged with the distribution of Ubuntu I am using.

Next was to log into the Subversion 'playground' Dr. Bowring setup for us to mess around with. First I wanted to be cool, so I tried accessing the playground via command line. I was unable to accomplish anything this way, I kept receiving server rejection errors. Probably because I did not know authenticate to the server through the command line tool. I knew it had to be something I was doing wrong because my command line skills are limited at this point in time, I'm betting this changes by the end of this semester. Therefore I turned to a Subversion GUI client called RapidSVN.

I downloaded and installed RapidSVN then launched the program. It did not take me long to learn the interface, it was fairly simple. I setup a repository by entering the repository URL, a user-name and a password; I was in. I looked at what others had done and then decided I needed to leave my own mark.

I began by checking out the repository onto my machine. Then I played with some of the existing files and even created a file using VIM. Took a minute to get used to this editor because it is my first time using it. Command mode and insert mode threw me off at first but it did not take me long to figure it out. I saved the text file and added it to my local repository, this is important because if a file is not added to your local repository it will not be committed to the repository on the server, then committed my local directory back to the server repository. No problems so far, everything seems very straightforward.

Figured I would play around a bit more though. I wanted to delete a folder so I deleted it on my machine then tried to commit my local working set to the on-line repository. I received an error instead of the desired results, this makes sense. I deleted the folder on the server and updated my directory and even though the folder was not on the server it stayed on my machine. I figured it would delete it, this was not the case. After further thought this made sense as well. I played around for a bit more and decided I was through for now.

Well, that is going to wrap up my first experience with Subversion. The next task at hand is obtaining the source code. I do not feel this will be difficult as we have done this before with last semester's project. More to come on this later....toodles!!