Subverting your Mac

Okay. Here I have my trusty old iBook with its broken screen back, and I'm going to use it as a server. First thing to install: Subversion. Subversion is a concurrent versioning system (like CVS), and apart from being a great tool if you have several people working on the same project, it is a neat way for people working alone to keep backups of all their source code easily, with the ability to roll back to any older version.
 
So, what do I do to install subversion? Well, first, I'm going to get subversion. You can get the server from Wilfredo Sanchez's iDisk (Finder: "Go to" -> "iDisk" -> "Other user's Public folder..." Username "wsanchez" and then navigate into "Software/packages/"). According to O'Reilly's MacDevCenter you need

• BerkeleyDB
• Expat
• Libxml2
• Neon
• SWIG
• APR
• APR-util
• Apache2
• Subversion

For the client on your other Macs, there's a nice subversion .pkg installer at:

http://www.codingmonkeys.de/mbo/

which is the web site of famous SubEthaEdit (fka Hydra) developer Martin Ott. In addition, you'll want to get SCPlugin, which is a plugin that adds "Subversion" menu items to your Finder's context menu.

This should save you some command-line-typing when committing/checking in your files. Note that SCplugin is configured via "System Preferences", where it also expects you to specify the path to subversion (/opt/subversion/bin/svn, if you're using Martin Ott's package). You also need to turn SCPlugin on there.

Once you've done that, check out your repository into a folder (using SCPlugin's "checkout" command). It will be empty, I know. Then just add all the files you want in your repository to that folder. Usually, you'll want a hierarchy with three folders per project: "trunk" (where your files go) and "tags" and "branches" you can leave empty until you're more familiar with Subversion. You can put other folders around the project folders and inside "trunk" however you please. E.g. my setup is:

Cocoa/
  UKDistributedView/
    branches/
    tags/
    trunk/
  Shovel/
    branches/
    tags/
    trunk/
Java/
  ColdCoffee/
    branches/
    tags/
    trunk/
  
  . . .

Where I copied the actual files (everything except the "build" folder) into each "trunk" folder. Once you've done that, you can do a "Select All" on the lowest level and an "Add..." in SCPlugin's contextual menu. Then do a "Commit" in the same place and you'll have your files in the repository.

If you're using xCode or Project Builder for most of your projects, you'll also want to heed Bill Bumgarner's advice on managing .pbxuser files in your xCode projects.

That's pretty much it. Between this, the O'Reilly article and the Subversion book, that should get you started :-)

Update: I wrote some more articles on Subversion that you may want to read. In particular, those are an Addendum to this one, a warning about checking in folders with custom icons, a Link to scripts for easily working with multiple files, and another with Links to using DarwinPorts to get SVN and more.

And also, I just started working on MAS, which is an attempt to bring a Subversion server to the Mac as a drop-installable application with a little GUI for starting/stopping it, not unlike MAMP.

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