At this point, you should understand how each commit creates an entirely new filesystem tree (called a “revision”) in the repository. If you don't, go back and read about revisions in the section called “Revisions”.
For this chapter, we'll go back to the same example from
Chapter 1, Fundamental Concepts. Remember that you and your
collaborator, Sally, are sharing a repository that contains two
projects, paint and
calc. Notice that in Figure 4.2, “Starting repository layout”, however, each project
directory now contains subdirectories named
trunk and branches.
The reason for this will soon become clear.
As before, assume that Sally and you both have working
copies of the “calc” project. Specifically, you
each have a working copy of /calc/trunk.
All the files for the project are in this subdirectory rather
than in /calc itself, because your team has
decided that /calc/trunk is where the
“main line” of development is going to take
place.
Let's say that you've been given the task of implementing a
large software feature. It will take a long time to write, and
will affect all the files in the project. The immediate problem
is that you don't want to interfere with Sally, who is in the
process of fixing small bugs here and there. She's depending on
the fact that the latest version of the project (in
/calc/trunk) is always usable. If you
start committing your changes bit by bit, you'll surely break
things for Sally (and other team members as well).
One strategy is to crawl into a hole: you and Sally can stop
sharing information for a week or two. That is, start gutting
and reorganizing all the files in your working copy, but don't
commit or update until you're completely finished with the task.
There are a number of problems with this, though. First, it's
not very safe. Most people like to save their work to the
repository frequently, should something bad accidentally happen
to their working copy. Second, it's not very flexible. If you
do your work on different computers (perhaps you have a working
copy of /calc/trunk on two different
machines), you'll need to manually copy your changes back and
forth or just do all the work on a single computer. By that
same token, it's difficult to share your changes in progress
with anyone else. A common software development “best
practice” is to allow your peers to review your work as
you go. If nobody sees your intermediate commits, you lose
potential feedback and may end up going down the wrong path for
weeks before another person on your team notices. Finally, when
you're finished with all your changes, you might find it very
difficult to remerge your final work with the rest of the
company's main body of code. Sally (or others) may have made
many other changes in the repository that are difficult to
incorporate into your working copy—especially if you
run svn update after weeks of
isolation.
The better solution is to create your own branch, or line of development, in the repository. This allows you to save your half-broken work frequently without interfering with others, yet you can still selectively share information with your collaborators. You'll see exactly how this works as we go.
Creating a branch is very simple—you make a copy of
the project in the repository using the svn
copy command. Subversion is able to copy not only
single files, but whole directories as well. In this case,
you want to make a copy of the
/calc/trunk directory. Where should the
new copy live? Wherever you wish—it's a matter of
project policy. Let's say that your team has a policy of
creating branches in the /calc/branches
area of the repository, and you want to name your branch
my-calc-branch. You'll want to create a
new directory,
/calc/branches/my-calc-branch, which
begins its life as a copy of
/calc/trunk.
You may already have seen svn copy used to copy one file to another within a working copy. But it can also be used to do a “remote” copy entirely within the repository. Just copy one URL to another:
$ svn copy http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/trunk \
http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/branches/my-calc-branch \
-m "Creating a private branch of /calc/trunk."
Committed revision 341.
This command causes a near-instantaneous commit in the
repository, creating a new directory in revision 341. The new
directory is a copy of /calc/trunk. This
is shown in
Figure 4.3, “Repository with new copy”.
[20]
While it's also possible to create a branch by
using svn copy to duplicate a directory
within the working copy, this technique isn't recommended. It
can be quite slow, in fact! Copying a directory on the
client side is a linear-time operation, in that it actually
has to duplicate every file and subdirectory on the local disk.
Copying a directory on the server, however, is a constant-time
operation, and it's the way most people create
branches.
Now that you've created a branch of the project, you can check out a new working copy to start using it:
$ svn checkout http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/branches/my-calc-branch A my-calc-branch/Makefile A my-calc-branch/integer.c A my-calc-branch/button.c Checked out revision 341.
There's nothing special about this working copy; it simply
mirrors a different directory in the repository. When you
commit changes, however, Sally won't see them when she
updates, because her working copy is of
/calc/trunk. (Be sure to read the section called “Traversing Branches” later in this chapter: the
svn switch command is an alternative way of
creating a working copy of a branch.)
Let's pretend that a week goes by, and the following commits happen:
-
You make a change to
/calc/branches/my-calc-branch/button.c, which creates revision 342. -
You make a change to
/calc/branches/my-calc-branch/integer.c, which creates revision 343. -
Sally makes a change to
/calc/trunk/integer.c, which creates revision 344.
Now two independent lines of development (shown
in Figure 4.4, “The branching of one file's history”) are happening on
integer.c.
Things get interesting when you look at the history of
changes made to your copy of
integer.c:
$ pwd /home/user/my-calc-branch $ svn log -v integer.c ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r343 | user | 2002-11-07 15:27:56 -0600 (Thu, 07 Nov 2002) | 2 lines Changed paths: M /calc/branches/my-calc-branch/integer.c * integer.c: frozzled the wazjub. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r341 | user | 2002-11-03 15:27:56 -0600 (Thu, 07 Nov 2002) | 2 lines Changed paths: A /calc/branches/my-calc-branch (from /calc/trunk:340) Creating a private branch of /calc/trunk. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r303 | sally | 2002-10-29 21:14:35 -0600 (Tue, 29 Oct 2002) | 2 lines Changed paths: M /calc/trunk/integer.c * integer.c: changed a docstring. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r98 | sally | 2002-02-22 15:35:29 -0600 (Fri, 22 Feb 2002) | 2 lines Changed paths: A /calc/trunk/integer.c * integer.c: adding this file to the project. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notice that Subversion is tracing the history of your
branch's integer.c all the way back
through time, even traversing the point where it was copied.
It shows the creation of the branch as an event in the
history, because integer.c was implicitly
copied when all of /calc/trunk/ was
copied. Now look at what happens when Sally runs the same
command on her copy of the file:
$ pwd /home/sally/calc $ svn log -v integer.c ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r344 | sally | 2002-11-07 15:27:56 -0600 (Thu, 07 Nov 2002) | 2 lines Changed paths: M /calc/trunk/integer.c * integer.c: fix a bunch of spelling errors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r303 | sally | 2002-10-29 21:14:35 -0600 (Tue, 29 Oct 2002) | 2 lines Changed paths: M /calc/trunk/integer.c * integer.c: changed a docstring. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r98 | sally | 2002-02-22 15:35:29 -0600 (Fri, 22 Feb 2002) | 2 lines Changed paths: A /calc/trunk/integer.c * integer.c: adding this file to the project. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sally sees her own revision 344 change, but not the change you made in revision 343. As far as Subversion is concerned, these two commits affected different files in different repository locations. However, Subversion does show that the two files share a common history. Before the branch copy was made in revision 341, the files used to be the same file. That's why you and Sally both see the changes made in revisions 303 and 98.
You should remember two important lessons from this section. First, Subversion has no internal concept of a branch—it knows only how to make copies. When you copy a directory, the resultant directory is only a “branch” because you attach that meaning to it. You may think of the directory differently, or treat it differently, but to Subversion it's just an ordinary directory that happens to carry some extra historical information.
Second, because of this copy mechanism, Subversion's
branches exist as normal filesystem
directories in the repository. This is different
from other version control systems, where branches are
typically defined by adding
extra-dimensional “labels” to collections of
files. The location of your branch directory doesn't matter
to Subversion. Most teams follow a convention of putting all
branches into a /branches directory, but
you're free to invent any policy you wish.
[20] Subversion does not support copying between different repositories. When using URLs with svn copy or svn move, you can only copy items within the same repository.