Configuring SVN

When I started using SVN 1.4.3 (r23084) with the help of TortoiseSVN, I have struck a number of quirky things and a number of must do things:

Ignoring bin, debug, etc. files in .Net development

You can use TSVN to edit the config, which is located in
"\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Subversion" and the file name is Config with no extension.

To get it to ignore these directories or files, you need to uncomment or edit the global-ignores line. In mine, I have it set to:

   global-ignores = bin obj *.suo *.obj *.pdb *.exe *.dll *.csproj.user

This will causes it to ignore the bin and obj sub-directories of a typical Visual Studio projects.

Supporting keyword substitution

Subversion supports keyword substitution even though it treats each check in as a file set. It is not as complete as that in VSS and these are the followings:
$Revision$, $Id$, $Date$, $HeadURL$ and $Author$

$HeadURL$ is particularly useful as it is expanded into the path in the repository and hence allowing one to quickly work out which branch does this file belong to. $Id$ is not as useful if you have already included $Revision$ + $Date$ + $Author$. BTW, it also supports the $Revision::$ convention to allow one to line up all the values, much like VSS.

To enable keyword substitution, you need to do:

1. Add the above keywords into the source file.
2. Edit the config file to include "enable-auto-props = yes"
3. Then in the "[auto-props]" section define the file types that support the keywords.

There is a quirky thing with SVN and when you define the supported keywords for a file type, say C#, you need to include a leading dummy keyword and a trailing dummy keywords. They are kind of sacrificial keywords to be thrown away keeping the wanted ones. Otherwise the substitution logic will ignore the leading and trailing keywords. You can specify which keywords are supported for which file type. For example to specify expansion for C# file, this is what you have to do:

[auto-props]
*.cs = svn:eol-style=native;svn:keywords="xx Revision Id Date HeadURL Author yy"

The ones in italics are the dummy ones. You can use any names.

Don't put all projects into one repository

For information, see the Pragmatic Version Control for advice.

Use symbolic link to set up repository

If you are using RANU (Run as a normal users>, you should consider putting all the repositories in "\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Svn-repos".

But doing so can make it hard to use command line program like svn, which uses a modified file URL convention requiring spaces to be replaced with %20. Rather than putting it on the root, you can set up a link to this directory in the root using the LinkD.exe, a tool which is part of the Windows Resource Kit. This does not damage the security settings of target directory or the link. You can use this command to do it:

Linkd c:\svn-repos "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Svn-Repos