Sorting out SVN checkin/checkout issues

Evgeny Petrov — Fri, 07 May 2010 01:40:19 +0000

As a software developer I work with SVN (our source control system) pretty extensively on a day-to-day basis. Having worked with several other systems in the past I must admit it is an excellent source/version control system, very easy to use for simple routine operations, but the one which has tons of small very useful (sometimes just amazingly useful) extensions. However it’s not without it’s own glitches.

In particular I’m talking about a “dead end” situation when there is a checkin/checkout conflict. These are details of it:

There is a working folder locally on my machine with numerous sub-folders and files in it, all of them are under Subversion control.
Apparently there are new files in SVN repository within this folder, added by other developers. These files are not yet in my working folder, but for whatever reason SVN thinks that they are.
When I do SVN Update in Tortoise SVN, nothing gets added into my working folder, because files are already marked as local in system SVN files.
If I do SVN Clean-up, it finishes successfully, but doesn’t resolve the issue.
If I manually place these new files into my working folder and do SVN Commit, it fails to do because files are already in SVN repository.

Okay, where to from here? I cannot checkout and I cannot commit, clean-up doesn’t work. This situation happens to me every now and then. Every time it is a painful effort to get it resolved. On-line search doesn’t help much. Finally yesterday I came up with a reasonably easy approach – Windows Explorer came to the rescue. Just make sure first that all changed items (if you have any) in your working folder are committed to SVN.

First I thought about creating a batch script to delete all system “.svn” folders within my working folder, but realised that I may lose this script in some time. Apparently an easier way is to open a Windows Explorer, navigate to your working folder and do search for “.svn”. The result might look like that (image is taken on Windows 7, but you can do the same on Vista or XP):

Now the only thing you need to do is to select all items and delete them. All of a sudden your working folder gets out of SVN control. Then in Windows Explorer navigate to your folder, right click with your mouse and do SVN Checkout – this will ensure that it gets back under SVN control with all missing files in place and order restored.

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Creating deployment packages in SVN

Evgeny Petrov — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:01:27 +0000

In software development (in an ASP.NET web development in particular) there are always repetitive time consuming tasks, which we would like to automate somehow. One of those things is the permanent need to create deployment/update packages with files which were changed since the last deployment. Until a week ago I have been creating this packages manually, simply by collecting changed files from various folders, organising them and deploying to the web hosting server. Last week I got very annoyed with that and after some research figured out how to utilize SVN/Subversion to do exactly that for you automatically.

Great. Just look at the next few screenshots how easy this is (just a note – this is demonstrated with the Windows SVN client – TortoiseSVN).

Step 1.

Open Repo-Browser and navigate to your website folder.

repo-browser in TortoiseSVN

Step 2.

Right click -Show Log, then select all revisions from top to bottom which you want to create a deployment package for.

Log screen in TortoiseSVN

Step 3.

Right click on the selection and select Compare Revisions.

Compare revisions

Step 4.

In the Changed Files Screen select all files, right click with your mouse and select Export selection to..

Export files

And that is it Enjoy your just created deployment package – structure of folders with files which were changed in your selected SVN revisions. Zip it up and deploy!

deployment package