So That is the Real Value

I was just playing with some changes, poking around in the dark and the whole SVN workflow felt really combersome. I was worried that maybe I had introduced too much process for such a simple operation. And then it hit me. It is 12:44am and I need to go to bed, but I am in the middle of changes, changes to the live site. 

Publish the trunk version to the webserver and I am good to go to bed. I’ll return to my poking around in the dark tomorrow. I love my branches.

Good night.

Merging a Branch to Trunk with SVN

I have a lot of faith in SVN. And once again things seem unintuitive. I like unintuitive cause it leads me to believe that someone really smart fought against the status quo to find the RIGHT solution, not the comfortable solution.

I am using TortoiseSVN. When you merge you apply a patch (the diff between two revisions) to a current working copy. So here is what I am doing.

I have a checkout from trunk and one for my bug fixing, call them A and B respectfully. I will apply the diff (B-A) to A. Then I can commit the changes in A back to the repository. 

Here goes nothing!

That didn’t work.

Okay, Tortoise has some great new features that don’t work for me because I have a server running pre-1.5. I get an error message about not being able to retrieve “mergeinfo”. I use a shared server so it isn’t as easy as upgrading. IT IS EASIER.

I use the most dangerous looking merge option in the first panel of the merge wizard; “Merge Two Different Trees.” This allows me to do exactly what I described earlier.

I got help from these two sources;

1. Ken Egozi’s Blog
2. SVNForum.org

SubVersion Workflow

I have a lot to write about on this topic but for now, at this late hour I just want to capture the workflow I am planning on using.

1. Create a branch with svn copy.
2. Check out this branch
3. Make changes
4. Commit changes to branch
5. Export branch to webserver
6. Test
7. Make further changes
8. Once satisfied merge branch to trunk
9. Deploy trunk

In the future I can modify this workflow to have branches deployed to test servers and only trunk deployed to the main server. We have low enough traffic and I do my work late enough at night that I don’t think this will be an issue.