[Orca-dev] Improving your Subversion checkouts

[Blair Zajac]

I'm noticing some inefficient checkouts of the Orca Subversion
repository.

People are telling Subversion to check out

   http://svn.orcaware.com/repos

Using this URL gets the *entire* repository, including branches and
tags of Orca and all my non-Orca projects.  If you are doing this,
try a `du' of your repos/tags directory.  It'll be huge.

This is probably not what you want.  Updating your copy of the
repository after a checkin takes a significant amount of time, and
when I tag a new copy of the Orca directory, you'll get an entire
copy of that in your filesystem.

Instead you can use a subdirectory of the URL and only check out that
portion of the tree.  I recommend using the following URL to check
out Orca

    http://svn.orcaware.com:8000/repos/trunk/orca/

Note that this goes to port 8000.  svn.orcaware.com is simply an
Apache 1.3.27 proxy to svn.orcaware.com:8000.  I've noticed that
this proxy sometimes fails, so it's better to go directly to the
svn server.

If you have an existing checkout using the first URL, you can
simply do something like this:

    % cd directory_containing_trunk
    % mv trunk/orca orca
    % rm -fr trunk
    % cd orca
    % go to work

This will leave you with an orca directory that contains just the
Orca directory from the repository.  Each directory in your checked
out tree contains all the information Subversion needs.

Also, you may want to check out these references:

    PowerPoint overview of Subversion
    http://www.orcaware.com/svn/Subversion-Blair_Zajac.ppt

    Subversion book (in progress) to be publish by O'Reilly
    http://svnbook.red-bean.com/book.html

    Subversion quick reference
    http://subversion.tigris.org/files/documents/15/177/foo.ps

Best,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac <blair at orcaware.com>
Web and OS performance plots - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/