Open Source Life: Subversion, a revision control system (part 3 of 3)
It’s such a lie to call this Part III. Feels like part 33, but I wanted to close out with a couple of final notes.
There’s only three:
1. DO NOT PUT EVERYTHING UNDER REVISION CONTROL
Really, it’s a bad idea. Everyone will make up different rules about this, but no matter what not everything should be placed inside the repository. I came up with the following couple of rules to prevent my habitual tendency to just Subversion stuff:
- Only put relatively stable drafts and projects under revision control.
- Only put things into Subversion that need change or version tracking. If I don’t care about previous revisions, keep it out of the repository.
- No images. Keep images someplace else unless they won’t be changing much and somehow need to be associated with a certain project like a web page.
- No program applications. Never, never.
- No “published” documents (aka. PDF or Microsoft Word Documents or OpenOffice Docs). XML, HTML, and even sometimes Rich Text Format (RTF) are all acceptable, but where possible, only check in the human parseable source of published documents.
2. Subversion is not a backup system
Subversion can make backing up extremely easy, and in my case, shrink the size of all of my documents (my repository hovers around 6 megabytes).
Once you put all your hard work into building your repository, make sure you have someplace located away from your computer’s hard disk to store a backup copy of it. There are loads of free online storage services available. Do yourself a favor and backup your work on one.
3. TortoiseSVN and Windows Vista don’t always play nicely
I don’t know why Microsoft had to go and be such a bunch of dick-bags and make Vista so different on the inside but so annoyingly not so much better on the outside. Case in point, every now and then TortoiseSVN seems to crash Explorer.exe. I’ll admit that I’ve been a bad Open Source community player by not submitting my crashes to either Windows or the TortoiseSVN group–admitting it in this article will probably shame me into doing something about it.
My friend Steve pointed me to this article about fixing a problem with TortoiseSVN on Windows Vista (e.g. Problems with errant File Locking). This wasn’t my problem, but I hope this can help someone else out.
Crashing Explorer.exe on Windows Vista does not have near the bad impact as on previous versions of Windows, but it’s still annoying. But it’s not too bad. I’ll be using Subversion long after I’m done using Windows.
That’s all I have to say right now. Hope you’re having a great weekend!
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