So we decided to use SVN because it’s cooler and more modern. It’s not so bad, especially for webapps. We like the atomic commits, webdav, yadda yadda. You know why it’s better than CVS we aren’t going to regurgitate that to you.
But when deploying we ran into some issues with SVN merge. If you always do updates in a batch and never have an “oh crap update this now” update then you’re fine. But as we all know, stuff happens. So when we have tried to merge the entire tree after merging single files manually we’ve had some interesting results — conflicts in certain places and an overall headache.
The typical way of tagging is using an svn cp and placing a snapshot of a particular trunk revision into the tags directory. This SVN tagging approach using svn merge was supposed to be analogous to our previous way of tagging prod checkouts with CVS.
However, as clouserw put it, “the recommended strategy is only useful when merging the complete trunk to a tag, and when individual revisions/files are involved, svn eats itself”. So to avoid the merge issues with SVN that we found using svn merge we have come up with a new method that uses SVN externals instead.
Both methods have weaknesses. SVN merge has the “eating itself” problem that presents a lot of conflicts and makes merging painful because of all the manual conflict resolution. When merging the entire tree, though, it is desirable because it doesn’t have the weaknesses below. Using SVN externals, you run into some interesting issues but you don’t get the SVN eating itself problem:
- Any locally modified files not in SVN (even when ignored) will kill a prod update in the event where an external must be updated (you get stuff like “svn: Failed to add directory ‘site/app/tests’: object of the same name already exists”)
- SVN externals cannot be a single file (they must be a directory so SVN can store info in an explicit .svn directory related to that checkout)
Aside from those two issues, just remembering the trunk revision we want in prod has been working for us. We’d like to find a good middle ground that doesn’t have us taking extra steps to update production when deploying trunk changes to the lives site.
So, if you guys have any input please let us know. We’re always open to suggestions.