Subversion Version Control. Using The Subversion Version Control System in Development Projects

4.2. Getting Files into the Repository

Now that you have created the empty repository, it's time to get the project files into it. To do this, you need to put the files into a basic directory structure for the repository, and then import the entire structure. It would be possible to make that directory structure as simple as a single directory named hello_world, with hello.c and Makefile inside. In practice, though, this isn't a very good directory structure to use.

If you recall from the previous chapter, Subversion does not have any built-in support for branches or tags, but instead just uses copies. This proves to be a flexible way to handle branches and tags, but if they're just copies, there is no set means for identifying what files are branches and what files are on the main source trunk. The recommended way to get around this missing information is to create three directories in your repository, one named branches, another named tags, and a third named trunk. Then, by convention, you can put all branched versions of the project into the branches directory and all tags into the tags directory. The trunk directory will be used to store the main development line of the project.

With large, complex repositories, there are a number of different ways you can set up the directories for the trunk, branches, and tags, which can accommodate multiple projects in one repository, or facilitate different development processes. Because our test project is simple though, we'll keep the repository simple and place everything at the top level of the repository. So, to get everything set up, you first need to create an overall directory for the repository, called repos. Then, set up trunk, branches, and tags directories under that, and move the original source files for the project into the trunk directory.

$ mkdir repos $ mkdir repos/trunk $ mkdir repos/branches $ mkdir repos/tags $ ls repos branches tags trunk $ mv hello.c repos/trunk/ $ mv Makefile repos/trunk/ $ ls repos/trunk/ Makefile hello.c

After the directories are created and filled, the only thing left to do is import the directory into our repository. This is done using the import command in the svn program.

$ svn import --message "Initial import" repos file:///home/bill/repositories/my_repository Adding repos/trunk Adding repos/trunk/hello.c Adding repos/branches Adding repos/tags Committed revision 1.

The --message "Initial import" option in the preceding example is used to tell Subversion what to use as a log message for the import. If you omit the --message option when you are importing or committing files to the repository, Subversion will automatically open an editor for you,^[1] which will allow you to type a log message as long and complex as you need it to be.

^[1] See Section 7.2, "Editing the Configuration Files."

Now that the repository structure has been imported, you can delete the original files. Everything should now be stored in the database, and ready for you to check out a working directory and begin hacking.