SMWG repository: How to start

Official docs

Subversion Online book (HTML version) is the full text of the Subversion O'Reilly book and I found the Quick Start there very useful.

Basic commands

Because of the way Subversion uses URLs, a separate repository for each authorization domain has been created: ie each set of people with write access (you can have a separate group of people with read-only access to each repository too.). In the following page the repository is the smwgtest test repository you can try out commands in that repository.

The URL is https://www.sysadmin.hep.ac.uk/svn/smwgtest and that is equivalent to file:///path/to/repos in the Subversion book. You can import a new set of files with CVS like commands:

mkdir -p /tmp/smwgtest/config1
echo 123 > /tmp/smwgtest/config1/123.txt
svn import /tmp/smwgtest/config1 https://www.sysadmin.hep.ac.uk/svn/smwgtest/config1 -m 'intial import'

Once something like this is done, you can examine the repository via the web too, at https://www.sysadmin.hep.ac.uk/svn/smwgtest/

mkdir -p /tmp/checkout
cd /tmp/checkout
svn checkout https://www.sysadmin.hep.ac.uk/svn/smwgtest/config1

will reproduce the config1 directory in /tmp/checkout (NB without any reference to smwgtest)

Certificate setup

As far as the client side security goes, running the svn command will produce a .subversion directory and files with default settings. Some of the questions subversion commands ask can be actually silenced configuring .subversion/servers file

ssl-client-cert-file = /path-to mycert/mycertificate.p12

should be enough to get it working. A small drawback is that the p12 export passphrase is needed for each SVN command.

If you have multiple svn servers, you can set it within a group statement.

[groups]
swmg = http://www.sysadmin.hep.ac.uk/svn/smwgtest
[swmg]
ssl-client-cert-file = /home/moreyc/.globus/escience-exp-06-05-07.p12

You can restrict the client to a list of trusted CAs with the following line if you want.

ssl-authority-files=trusted-CA-cert1,trusted-CA-cert2....

The DN of your certificate needs to be added to the apropriate ACLs lists to gain access to the repository. If you want to commit something contact Alessandra Forti.

Enabling the subversion Id tag

It is really useful to have the Id tag automatically updated on the files when they are committed. Differently from cvs subversion doesn't do it automatically it needs to be configured. To do that edit you ~/.subversion/config file and add or uncomment the following lines:

[miscellany]
enable-auto-props = yes

[auto-props]
* = svn:keywords=Id

you need to do it before adding any file to the repository. Global settings don't work on files already in the repository.

Files banners

Each file committed should contain a banner to know Some basic information like the author, the data of creation etc, etc. The basic information contained should be the following:

##################################
# Description:
# Author:
# Institute:
# Created:
# License:
# $Id:$
##################################

Licencing your files is not mandatory but some people want to do it. A short list of most commonly used Open Source licenses pointers can be found at here for convenience. List can be extended if needed.

$Id:$ is expanded by subversion once the file is committed.

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