How to use SVN Branch Tag Trunk

Question

I was googling around a little bit and couldn t find a good  beginners  guide to SVN  not in the meaning of  how do I use the commands  rather  How do I control my source code   What I d like to clear up is the following topics    How often do you commit  As often as one would press Ctrl   s  What is a Branch and what is a Tag and how do you control them  What goes into the SVN  Only Source Code or do you share other files here aswell   Not considered versioned files       I don t have any idea what branch and tag is so I don t know the purpose  but my wild guess is that you upload stuff to the trunk and when you do a major build you move it to the branch  So  what is considered a major build in this case

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Just to add another set of answers    I commit whenever I finish a piece of work  Sometimes it s a tiny bugfix that just changed one line and took me 2 minutes to do  other times it s two weeks worth of sweat  Also  as a rule of thumb  you don t commit anything that breaks the build  Thus if it has taken you a long time to do something  take the latest version before committing  and see if your changes break the build  Of course  if I go a long time without committing  it makes me uneasy because I don t want to loose that work  In TFS I use this nice thing as  shelvesets  for this  In SVN you ll have to work around in another way  Perhaps create your own branch or backup these files manually to another machine  Branches are copies of your whole project  The best illustration for their use is perhaps the versioning of products  Imagine that you are working at a large project  say  the Linux kernel   After months of sweat you ve finally arrived at version 1 0 that you release to the public  After that you start to work on version 2 0 of you product which is going to be way better  But in the mean time there are also a lot of people out there which are using version 1 0  And these people find bugs that you have to fix  Now  you can t fix the bug in the upcoming 2 0 version and ship that to the clients - it s not ready at all  Instead you have to pull out an old copy of 1 0 source  fix the bug there  and ship that to the people  This is what branches are for  When you released the 1 0 version you made a branch in SVN which made a copy of the source code at that point  This branch was named  1 0   You then continued work on the next version in your main source copy  but the 1 0 copy remained there as it was at the moment of the release  And you can continue fixing bugs there  Tags are just names attached to specific revisions for ease of use  You could say  Revision 2342 of the source code   but it s easier to refer to it as  First stable revision      I usually put everything in the source control that relates directly to the programming  For example  since I m making webpages  I also put images and CSS files in source control  not to mention config files etc  Project documentation does not go in there  however that is actually just a matter of preference

User · Answer

Here are a few resources on commit frequency  commit messages  project structure  what to put under source control and other general guidelines    Best Practices of Version Control  my own blog  Check in Early  Check in Often  Coding Horror   comments here contain a lot of good advice  KDE s commit policy   These Stack Overflow questions also contain some useful information that may be of interest    Organizing the source code base when mixing two or more languages  like Java and C    Suggestions for a good commit message  format guideline  How often to commit changes to source control  Learning Version Control  and learning it good   Regarding the basic Subversion concepts such as branching and tagging  I think this is very well explained in the Subversion book   As you may realize after reading up a bit more on the subject  people s opinions on what s best practice in this area are often varying and sometimes conflicting  I think the best option for you is to read about what other people are doing and pick the guidelines and practices that you feel make most sense to you   I don t think it s a good idea to adopt a practice if you do not understand the purpose of it or don t agree to the rationale behind it  So don t follow any advice blindly  but rather make up your own mind about what you think will work best for you  Also  experimenting with different ways of doing things is a good way to learn and find out how you best like to work  A good example of this is how you structure the repository  There is no right or wrong way to do it  and it s often hard to know which way you prefer until you have actually tried them in practice

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Others have stated that it depends on your style   The big question for you is how often you  integrate  your software   Test driven development  Agile and Scrum  and many  many others  rely on small changes and continuous integration   They preach that small changes are made  everyone finds the breaks and fixes them all the time   However on a larger project  think government  defence  100k LOC  you simply can t use continuous integration as it s not possible   In these situations it may be better to use branching to do lots of little commits on but bring back into the trunk ONLY what will work and is ready to be integrated into the build   One caveat with branching though is that if they aren t managed properly  it can be a nightmare in your repository to get work into the trunk  as everyone is developing from different spots on the trunk  which is incidentally one of the largest arguments for continuous integration    There is no definitive answer on this question  the best way is to work with your team to come up with the best compromise solution

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The policy at our work goes like this  multi-developer team working on object oriented framework     Update from SVN every day to get the previous day s changes Commit daily so if you are sick or absent next day s  someone else can easily take over from where you left off  Don t commit code that breaks anything  since that will impact the other developers  Work on small chunks and commit daily WITH MEANINGFUL COMMENTS  As a team  Keep a Development branch  then move pre-release code  for QA  into a Production branch  This branch should only ever have fully working code

User · Answer

The subversion book is an excellent source of information on strategies for laying out your repository  branching and tagging   See also   Do you continue development in a branch or in the trunk  Branching strategies

User · Answer

Here are a few resources on commit frequency  commit messages  project structure  what to put under source control and other general guidelines    Best Practices of Version Control  my own blog  Check in Early  Check in Often  Coding Horror   comments here contain a lot of good advice  KDE s commit policy   These Stack Overflow questions also contain some useful information that may be of interest    Organizing the source code base when mixing two or more languages  like Java and C    Suggestions for a good commit message  format guideline  How often to commit changes to source control  Learning Version Control  and learning it good   Regarding the basic Subversion concepts such as branching and tagging  I think this is very well explained in the Subversion book   As you may realize after reading up a bit more on the subject  people s opinions on what s best practice in this area are often varying and sometimes conflicting  I think the best option for you is to read about what other people are doing and pick the guidelines and practices that you feel make most sense to you   I don t think it s a good idea to adopt a practice if you do not understand the purpose of it or don t agree to the rationale behind it  So don t follow any advice blindly  but rather make up your own mind about what you think will work best for you  Also  experimenting with different ways of doing things is a good way to learn and find out how you best like to work  A good example of this is how you structure the repository  There is no right or wrong way to do it  and it s often hard to know which way you prefer until you have actually tried them in practice

User · Answer

I asked myself the same questions when we came to implement Subversion here -- about 20 developers spread across 4 - 6 projects   I didn t find any one good source with   the answer     Here are some parts of how our answer has developed over the last 3 years   -- commit as often as is useful  our rule of thumb is commit whenever you have done sufficient work that it would be a problem having to re-do it if the modifications got lost  sometimes I commit every 15 minutes or so  other times it might be days  yes  sometimes it takes me a day to write 1 line of code   -- we use branches  as one of your earlier answers suggested  for different development paths  right now for one of our programs we have 3 active branches  1 for the main development  1 for the as-yet-unfinished effort to parallelise the program  and 1 for the effort to revise it to use XML input and output files   -- we scarcely use tags  though we think we ought to use them to identify releases to production   Think of development proceeding along a single path   At some time or state of development marketing decide to release the first version of the product  so you plant a flag in the path labelled  1   or  1 0  or what have you    At some other time some bright spark decides to parallelise the program  but decides that that will take weeks and that people want to keep going down the main path in the meantime   So you build a fork in the path and different people wander off down the different forks   The flags in the road are called  tags   and the forks in the road are where  branches  divide   Occasionally  also  branches come back together   -- we put all material necessary to build an executable  or system  into the repository  That means at least source code and make file  or project files for Visual Studio    But when we have icons and config files and all that other stuff  that goes into the repository   Some documentation finds its way into the repo  certainly any documentation such as help files which might be integral to the program does  and it s a useful place to put developer documentation   We even put Windows executables for our production releases in there  to provide a single location for people looking for software -- our Linux releases go to a server so don t need to be stored   -- we don t require that the repository at all times be capable of delivering a latest version which builds and executes  some projects work that way  some don t  the decision rests with the project manager and depends on many factors but I think it breaks down when making major changes to a program

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A lot of good comments here  but something that hasn t been mentioned is commit messages  These should be mandatory and meaningful  Especially with branching merging  This will allow you to keep track of what changes are relevant to which bugs features   for example svn commit   -m  bug  201 fixed y2k bug in code  will tell anyone who looks at the history what that revision was for   Some bug tracking systems  eg trac  can look in the repository for these messages and associate them with the tickets  Which makes working out what changes are associated with each ticket very easy

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The TortoiseSVN TSVN Manual is based on subversion book  but available in a lot more languages

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As others have said  the SVN Book is the best place to start and a great reference once you ve gotten your sea legs   Now  to your questions      How often do you commit  As often as one would press ctrl   s   Often  but not as often as you press ctrl   s   It s a matter of personal taste and or team policy   Personally I would say commit when you complete a functional piece of code  however small     What is a Branch and what is a Tag and how do you control them   First  trunk is where you do your active development   It is the mainline of your code   A branch is some deviation from the mainline   It could be a major deviation  like a previous release  or just a minor tweak you want to try out   A tag is a snapshot of your code   It s a way to attach a label or bookmark to a particular revision     It s also worth mentioning that in subversion  trunk  branches and tags are only convention   Nothing stops you from doing work in tags or having branches that are your mainline  or disregarding the tag-branch-trunk scheme all together   But  unless you have a very good reason  it s best to stick with convention   What goes into the SVN  Only Source Code or do you share other files here aswell   Also a personal or team choice   I prefer to keep anything related to the build in my repository   That includes config files  build scripts  related media files  docs  etc   You should not check in files that need to be different on each developer s machine   Nor do you need to check in by-products of your code   I m thinking mostly of build folders  object files  and the like

User · Answer

Commit frequency depends on your style of project management   Many people refrain from committing if it ll break the build  or functionality    Branches can be used in one of two ways  typically  1  One active branch for development  and the trunk stays stable   or 2  branches for alternate dev paths   Tags are generally used for identifying releases  so they don t get lost in the mix   The definition of  release  is up to you

User · Answer

Just to add another set of answers    I commit whenever I finish a piece of work  Sometimes it s a tiny bugfix that just changed one line and took me 2 minutes to do  other times it s two weeks worth of sweat  Also  as a rule of thumb  you don t commit anything that breaks the build  Thus if it has taken you a long time to do something  take the latest version before committing  and see if your changes break the build  Of course  if I go a long time without committing  it makes me uneasy because I don t want to loose that work  In TFS I use this nice thing as  shelvesets  for this  In SVN you ll have to work around in another way  Perhaps create your own branch or backup these files manually to another machine  Branches are copies of your whole project  The best illustration for their use is perhaps the versioning of products  Imagine that you are working at a large project  say  the Linux kernel   After months of sweat you ve finally arrived at version 1 0 that you release to the public  After that you start to work on version 2 0 of you product which is going to be way better  But in the mean time there are also a lot of people out there which are using version 1 0  And these people find bugs that you have to fix  Now  you can t fix the bug in the upcoming 2 0 version and ship that to the clients - it s not ready at all  Instead you have to pull out an old copy of 1 0 source  fix the bug there  and ship that to the people  This is what branches are for  When you released the 1 0 version you made a branch in SVN which made a copy of the source code at that point  This branch was named  1 0   You then continued work on the next version in your main source copy  but the 1 0 copy remained there as it was at the moment of the release  And you can continue fixing bugs there  Tags are just names attached to specific revisions for ease of use  You could say  Revision 2342 of the source code   but it s easier to refer to it as  First stable revision      I usually put everything in the source control that relates directly to the programming  For example  since I m making webpages  I also put images and CSS files in source control  not to mention config files etc  Project documentation does not go in there  however that is actually just a matter of preference

User · Answer

Just to add another set of answers    I commit whenever I finish a piece of work  Sometimes it s a tiny bugfix that just changed one line and took me 2 minutes to do  other times it s two weeks worth of sweat  Also  as a rule of thumb  you don t commit anything that breaks the build  Thus if it has taken you a long time to do something  take the latest version before committing  and see if your changes break the build  Of course  if I go a long time without committing  it makes me uneasy because I don t want to loose that work  In TFS I use this nice thing as  shelvesets  for this  In SVN you ll have to work around in another way  Perhaps create your own branch or backup these files manually to another machine  Branches are copies of your whole project  The best illustration for their use is perhaps the versioning of products  Imagine that you are working at a large project  say  the Linux kernel   After months of sweat you ve finally arrived at version 1 0 that you release to the public  After that you start to work on version 2 0 of you product which is going to be way better  But in the mean time there are also a lot of people out there which are using version 1 0  And these people find bugs that you have to fix  Now  you can t fix the bug in the upcoming 2 0 version and ship that to the clients - it s not ready at all  Instead you have to pull out an old copy of 1 0 source  fix the bug there  and ship that to the people  This is what branches are for  When you released the 1 0 version you made a branch in SVN which made a copy of the source code at that point  This branch was named  1 0   You then continued work on the next version in your main source copy  but the 1 0 copy remained there as it was at the moment of the release  And you can continue fixing bugs there  Tags are just names attached to specific revisions for ease of use  You could say  Revision 2342 of the source code   but it s easier to refer to it as  First stable revision      I usually put everything in the source control that relates directly to the programming  For example  since I m making webpages  I also put images and CSS files in source control  not to mention config files etc  Project documentation does not go in there  however that is actually just a matter of preference

User · Answer

As others have said  the SVN Book is the best place to start and a great reference once you ve gotten your sea legs   Now  to your questions      How often do you commit  As often as one would press ctrl   s   Often  but not as often as you press ctrl   s   It s a matter of personal taste and or team policy   Personally I would say commit when you complete a functional piece of code  however small     What is a Branch and what is a Tag and how do you control them   First  trunk is where you do your active development   It is the mainline of your code   A branch is some deviation from the mainline   It could be a major deviation  like a previous release  or just a minor tweak you want to try out   A tag is a snapshot of your code   It s a way to attach a label or bookmark to a particular revision     It s also worth mentioning that in subversion  trunk  branches and tags are only convention   Nothing stops you from doing work in tags or having branches that are your mainline  or disregarding the tag-branch-trunk scheme all together   But  unless you have a very good reason  it s best to stick with convention   What goes into the SVN  Only Source Code or do you share other files here aswell   Also a personal or team choice   I prefer to keep anything related to the build in my repository   That includes config files  build scripts  related media files  docs  etc   You should not check in files that need to be different on each developer s machine   Nor do you need to check in by-products of your code   I m thinking mostly of build folders  object files  and the like

User · Answer

For committing  I use the following strategies    commit as often as possible  Each feature change bugfix should get its own commit  don t commit many files at once since that will make the history for that file unclear -- e g  If I change a logging module and a GUI module independently and I commit both at once  both changes will be visible in both file histories  This makes reading a file history difficult   don t break the build on any commit -- it should be possible to retrieve any version of the repository and build it    All files that are necessary for building and running the app should be in SVN  Test files and such should not  unless they are part of the unit tests

User · Answer

The policy at our work goes like this  multi-developer team working on object oriented framework     Update from SVN every day to get the previous day s changes Commit daily so if you are sick or absent next day s  someone else can easily take over from where you left off  Don t commit code that breaks anything  since that will impact the other developers  Work on small chunks and commit daily WITH MEANINGFUL COMMENTS  As a team  Keep a Development branch  then move pre-release code  for QA  into a Production branch  This branch should only ever have fully working code

User · Answer

Eric Sink  who appeared on SO podcast 36 in January 2009  wrote an excellent series of articles under the title Source Control How-to    Eric is the founder of SourceGear who market a plug-compatible version of SourceSafe  but without the horribleness

User · Answer

Eric Sink  who appeared on SO podcast 36 in January 2009  wrote an excellent series of articles under the title Source Control How-to    Eric is the founder of SourceGear who market a plug-compatible version of SourceSafe  but without the horribleness

User · Answer

I thinks there is two way about committing frequency    Commit very often  for each implemented method  small part of code  etc  Commit only completed parts of code  like modules  etc    I prefer the first one - because using source control system is very useful not only for project or company  the first of all it s useful for the developer  For me the best feature is to roll back all code while searching the best assigned task implementation

User · Answer

Eric Sink  who appeared on SO podcast 36 in January 2009  wrote an excellent series of articles under the title Source Control How-to    Eric is the founder of SourceGear who market a plug-compatible version of SourceSafe  but without the horribleness

User · Answer

I asked myself the same questions when we came to implement Subversion here -- about 20 developers spread across 4 - 6 projects   I didn t find any one good source with   the answer     Here are some parts of how our answer has developed over the last 3 years   -- commit as often as is useful  our rule of thumb is commit whenever you have done sufficient work that it would be a problem having to re-do it if the modifications got lost  sometimes I commit every 15 minutes or so  other times it might be days  yes  sometimes it takes me a day to write 1 line of code   -- we use branches  as one of your earlier answers suggested  for different development paths  right now for one of our programs we have 3 active branches  1 for the main development  1 for the as-yet-unfinished effort to parallelise the program  and 1 for the effort to revise it to use XML input and output files   -- we scarcely use tags  though we think we ought to use them to identify releases to production   Think of development proceeding along a single path   At some time or state of development marketing decide to release the first version of the product  so you plant a flag in the path labelled  1   or  1 0  or what have you    At some other time some bright spark decides to parallelise the program  but decides that that will take weeks and that people want to keep going down the main path in the meantime   So you build a fork in the path and different people wander off down the different forks   The flags in the road are called  tags   and the forks in the road are where  branches  divide   Occasionally  also  branches come back together   -- we put all material necessary to build an executable  or system  into the repository  That means at least source code and make file  or project files for Visual Studio    But when we have icons and config files and all that other stuff  that goes into the repository   Some documentation finds its way into the repo  certainly any documentation such as help files which might be integral to the program does  and it s a useful place to put developer documentation   We even put Windows executables for our production releases in there  to provide a single location for people looking for software -- our Linux releases go to a server so don t need to be stored   -- we don t require that the repository at all times be capable of delivering a latest version which builds and executes  some projects work that way  some don t  the decision rests with the project manager and depends on many factors but I think it breaks down when making major changes to a program

User · Answer

Just to add another set of answers    I commit whenever I finish a piece of work  Sometimes it s a tiny bugfix that just changed one line and took me 2 minutes to do  other times it s two weeks worth of sweat  Also  as a rule of thumb  you don t commit anything that breaks the build  Thus if it has taken you a long time to do something  take the latest version before committing  and see if your changes break the build  Of course  if I go a long time without committing  it makes me uneasy because I don t want to loose that work  In TFS I use this nice thing as  shelvesets  for this  In SVN you ll have to work around in another way  Perhaps create your own branch or backup these files manually to another machine  Branches are copies of your whole project  The best illustration for their use is perhaps the versioning of products  Imagine that you are working at a large project  say  the Linux kernel   After months of sweat you ve finally arrived at version 1 0 that you release to the public  After that you start to work on version 2 0 of you product which is going to be way better  But in the mean time there are also a lot of people out there which are using version 1 0  And these people find bugs that you have to fix  Now  you can t fix the bug in the upcoming 2 0 version and ship that to the clients - it s not ready at all  Instead you have to pull out an old copy of 1 0 source  fix the bug there  and ship that to the people  This is what branches are for  When you released the 1 0 version you made a branch in SVN which made a copy of the source code at that point  This branch was named  1 0   You then continued work on the next version in your main source copy  but the 1 0 copy remained there as it was at the moment of the release  And you can continue fixing bugs there  Tags are just names attached to specific revisions for ease of use  You could say  Revision 2342 of the source code   but it s easier to refer to it as  First stable revision      I usually put everything in the source control that relates directly to the programming  For example  since I m making webpages  I also put images and CSS files in source control  not to mention config files etc  Project documentation does not go in there  however that is actually just a matter of preference

User · Answer

As others have said  the SVN Book is the best place to start and a great reference once you ve gotten your sea legs   Now  to your questions      How often do you commit  As often as one would press ctrl   s   Often  but not as often as you press ctrl   s   It s a matter of personal taste and or team policy   Personally I would say commit when you complete a functional piece of code  however small     What is a Branch and what is a Tag and how do you control them   First  trunk is where you do your active development   It is the mainline of your code   A branch is some deviation from the mainline   It could be a major deviation  like a previous release  or just a minor tweak you want to try out   A tag is a snapshot of your code   It s a way to attach a label or bookmark to a particular revision     It s also worth mentioning that in subversion  trunk  branches and tags are only convention   Nothing stops you from doing work in tags or having branches that are your mainline  or disregarding the tag-branch-trunk scheme all together   But  unless you have a very good reason  it s best to stick with convention   What goes into the SVN  Only Source Code or do you share other files here aswell   Also a personal or team choice   I prefer to keep anything related to the build in my repository   That includes config files  build scripts  related media files  docs  etc   You should not check in files that need to be different on each developer s machine   Nor do you need to check in by-products of your code   I m thinking mostly of build folders  object files  and the like

User · Answer

Here are a few resources on commit frequency  commit messages  project structure  what to put under source control and other general guidelines    Best Practices of Version Control  my own blog  Check in Early  Check in Often  Coding Horror   comments here contain a lot of good advice  KDE s commit policy   These Stack Overflow questions also contain some useful information that may be of interest    Organizing the source code base when mixing two or more languages  like Java and C    Suggestions for a good commit message  format guideline  How often to commit changes to source control  Learning Version Control  and learning it good   Regarding the basic Subversion concepts such as branching and tagging  I think this is very well explained in the Subversion book   As you may realize after reading up a bit more on the subject  people s opinions on what s best practice in this area are often varying and sometimes conflicting  I think the best option for you is to read about what other people are doing and pick the guidelines and practices that you feel make most sense to you   I don t think it s a good idea to adopt a practice if you do not understand the purpose of it or don t agree to the rationale behind it  So don t follow any advice blindly  but rather make up your own mind about what you think will work best for you  Also  experimenting with different ways of doing things is a good way to learn and find out how you best like to work  A good example of this is how you structure the repository  There is no right or wrong way to do it  and it s often hard to know which way you prefer until you have actually tried them in practice

User · Answer

For committing  I use the following strategies    commit as often as possible  Each feature change bugfix should get its own commit  don t commit many files at once since that will make the history for that file unclear -- e g  If I change a logging module and a GUI module independently and I commit both at once  both changes will be visible in both file histories  This makes reading a file history difficult   don t break the build on any commit -- it should be possible to retrieve any version of the repository and build it    All files that are necessary for building and running the app should be in SVN  Test files and such should not  unless they are part of the unit tests

User · Answer

Here are a few resources on commit frequency  commit messages  project structure  what to put under source control and other general guidelines    Best Practices of Version Control  my own blog  Check in Early  Check in Often  Coding Horror   comments here contain a lot of good advice  KDE s commit policy   These Stack Overflow questions also contain some useful information that may be of interest    Organizing the source code base when mixing two or more languages  like Java and C    Suggestions for a good commit message  format guideline  How often to commit changes to source control  Learning Version Control  and learning it good   Regarding the basic Subversion concepts such as branching and tagging  I think this is very well explained in the Subversion book   As you may realize after reading up a bit more on the subject  people s opinions on what s best practice in this area are often varying and sometimes conflicting  I think the best option for you is to read about what other people are doing and pick the guidelines and practices that you feel make most sense to you   I don t think it s a good idea to adopt a practice if you do not understand the purpose of it or don t agree to the rationale behind it  So don t follow any advice blindly  but rather make up your own mind about what you think will work best for you  Also  experimenting with different ways of doing things is a good way to learn and find out how you best like to work  A good example of this is how you structure the repository  There is no right or wrong way to do it  and it s often hard to know which way you prefer until you have actually tried them in practice

User · Answer

I asked myself the same questions when we came to implement Subversion here -- about 20 developers spread across 4 - 6 projects   I didn t find any one good source with   the answer     Here are some parts of how our answer has developed over the last 3 years   -- commit as often as is useful  our rule of thumb is commit whenever you have done sufficient work that it would be a problem having to re-do it if the modifications got lost  sometimes I commit every 15 minutes or so  other times it might be days  yes  sometimes it takes me a day to write 1 line of code   -- we use branches  as one of your earlier answers suggested  for different development paths  right now for one of our programs we have 3 active branches  1 for the main development  1 for the as-yet-unfinished effort to parallelise the program  and 1 for the effort to revise it to use XML input and output files   -- we scarcely use tags  though we think we ought to use them to identify releases to production   Think of development proceeding along a single path   At some time or state of development marketing decide to release the first version of the product  so you plant a flag in the path labelled  1   or  1 0  or what have you    At some other time some bright spark decides to parallelise the program  but decides that that will take weeks and that people want to keep going down the main path in the meantime   So you build a fork in the path and different people wander off down the different forks   The flags in the road are called  tags   and the forks in the road are where  branches  divide   Occasionally  also  branches come back together   -- we put all material necessary to build an executable  or system  into the repository  That means at least source code and make file  or project files for Visual Studio    But when we have icons and config files and all that other stuff  that goes into the repository   Some documentation finds its way into the repo  certainly any documentation such as help files which might be integral to the program does  and it s a useful place to put developer documentation   We even put Windows executables for our production releases in there  to provide a single location for people looking for software -- our Linux releases go to a server so don t need to be stored   -- we don t require that the repository at all times be capable of delivering a latest version which builds and executes  some projects work that way  some don t  the decision rests with the project manager and depends on many factors but I think it breaks down when making major changes to a program

User · Answer

How often do you commit  As often as one would press ctrl   s    As often as possible  Code doesn t exist unless it is under source control     Frequent commits  thereafter smaller change sets  allows you to integrate your changes easily and increase chances to not break something   Other people noted that you should commit when you have a functional piece of code  however I find it useful to commit slightly more often  Few times I noticed that I use source control as a quick undo redo mechanism   When I work on my own branch I prefer to commit as much as possible  literally as often as I press ctrl s      What is a Branch and what is a Tag and how do you control them    Read SVN book - it is a place you should start with when learning SVN    What s a Branch  Tags      What goes into the SVN     Documentation  small binaries required for build and other stuff that have some value go to source control

User · Answer

Version Control with Subversion is the guide for beginners and old hands alike   I don t think you can use Subversion effectively without reading at least the first few chapters of this

User · Answer

Commit frequency depends on your style of project management   Many people refrain from committing if it ll break the build  or functionality    Branches can be used in one of two ways  typically  1  One active branch for development  and the trunk stays stable   or 2  branches for alternate dev paths   Tags are generally used for identifying releases  so they don t get lost in the mix   The definition of  release  is up to you

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Commit frequency depends on your style of project management   Many people refrain from committing if it ll break the build  or functionality    Branches can be used in one of two ways  typically  1  One active branch for development  and the trunk stays stable   or 2  branches for alternate dev paths   Tags are generally used for identifying releases  so they don t get lost in the mix   The definition of  release  is up to you

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Version Control with Subversion is the guide for beginners and old hands alike   I don t think you can use Subversion effectively without reading at least the first few chapters of this

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Eric Sink  who appeared on SO podcast 36 in January 2009  wrote an excellent series of articles under the title Source Control How-to    Eric is the founder of SourceGear who market a plug-compatible version of SourceSafe  but without the horribleness

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Version Control with Subversion is the guide for beginners and old hands alike   I don t think you can use Subversion effectively without reading at least the first few chapters of this

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I think the main problem is the mental picture of source control is confused  We commonly have trunk and branches  but then we get unrelated ideas of tags releases or something to that affect   If you use the idea of a tree more completely it becomes clearer  at least for me it is    We get the trunk -  forms branches -  produce fruit  tags releases    The idea being that you grow the project from a trunk  which then creates branches once the trunk is stable enough to hold the branch  Then when the branch has produced a fruit you pluck it from the branch and release it as a tag   Tags are essentially deliverables  Whereas trunk and branches produce them

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Commit frequency depends on your style of project management   Many people refrain from committing if it ll break the build  or functionality    Branches can be used in one of two ways  typically  1  One active branch for development  and the trunk stays stable   or 2  branches for alternate dev paths   Tags are generally used for identifying releases  so they don t get lost in the mix   The definition of  release  is up to you

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The TortoiseSVN TSVN Manual is based on subversion book  but available in a lot more languages

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A lot of good comments here  but something that hasn t been mentioned is commit messages  These should be mandatory and meaningful  Especially with branching merging  This will allow you to keep track of what changes are relevant to which bugs features   for example svn commit   -m  bug  201 fixed y2k bug in code  will tell anyone who looks at the history what that revision was for   Some bug tracking systems  eg trac  can look in the repository for these messages and associate them with the tickets  Which makes working out what changes are associated with each ticket very easy

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Version Control with Subversion is the guide for beginners and old hands alike   I don t think you can use Subversion effectively without reading at least the first few chapters of this

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I thinks there is two way about committing frequency    Commit very often  for each implemented method  small part of code  etc  Commit only completed parts of code  like modules  etc    I prefer the first one - because using source control system is very useful not only for project or company  the first of all it s useful for the developer  For me the best feature is to roll back all code while searching the best assigned task implementation

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I think the main problem is the mental picture of source control is confused  We commonly have trunk and branches  but then we get unrelated ideas of tags releases or something to that affect   If you use the idea of a tree more completely it becomes clearer  at least for me it is    We get the trunk -  forms branches -  produce fruit  tags releases    The idea being that you grow the project from a trunk  which then creates branches once the trunk is stable enough to hold the branch  Then when the branch has produced a fruit you pluck it from the branch and release it as a tag   Tags are essentially deliverables  Whereas trunk and branches produce them

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A lot of good comments here  but something that hasn t been mentioned is commit messages  These should be mandatory and meaningful  Especially with branching merging  This will allow you to keep track of what changes are relevant to which bugs features   for example svn commit   -m  bug  201 fixed y2k bug in code  will tell anyone who looks at the history what that revision was for   Some bug tracking systems  eg trac  can look in the repository for these messages and associate them with the tickets  Which makes working out what changes are associated with each ticket very easy

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How often do you commit  As often as one would press ctrl   s    As often as possible  Code doesn t exist unless it is under source control     Frequent commits  thereafter smaller change sets  allows you to integrate your changes easily and increase chances to not break something   Other people noted that you should commit when you have a functional piece of code  however I find it useful to commit slightly more often  Few times I noticed that I use source control as a quick undo redo mechanism   When I work on my own branch I prefer to commit as much as possible  literally as often as I press ctrl s      What is a Branch and what is a Tag and how do you control them    Read SVN book - it is a place you should start with when learning SVN    What s a Branch  Tags      What goes into the SVN     Documentation  small binaries required for build and other stuff that have some value go to source control

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The TortoiseSVN TSVN Manual is based on subversion book  but available in a lot more languages

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For committing  I use the following strategies    commit as often as possible  Each feature change bugfix should get its own commit  don t commit many files at once since that will make the history for that file unclear -- e g  If I change a logging module and a GUI module independently and I commit both at once  both changes will be visible in both file histories  This makes reading a file history difficult   don t break the build on any commit -- it should be possible to retrieve any version of the repository and build it    All files that are necessary for building and running the app should be in SVN  Test files and such should not  unless they are part of the unit tests

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The subversion book is an excellent source of information on strategies for laying out your repository  branching and tagging   See also   Do you continue development in a branch or in the trunk  Branching strategies

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I thinks there is two way about committing frequency    Commit very often  for each implemented method  small part of code  etc  Commit only completed parts of code  like modules  etc    I prefer the first one - because using source control system is very useful not only for project or company  the first of all it s useful for the developer  For me the best feature is to roll back all code while searching the best assigned task implementation

User · Answer

The subversion book is an excellent source of information on strategies for laying out your repository  branching and tagging   See also   Do you continue development in a branch or in the trunk  Branching strategies

User · Answer

Others have stated that it depends on your style   The big question for you is how often you  integrate  your software   Test driven development  Agile and Scrum  and many  many others  rely on small changes and continuous integration   They preach that small changes are made  everyone finds the breaks and fixes them all the time   However on a larger project  think government  defence  100k LOC  you simply can t use continuous integration as it s not possible   In these situations it may be better to use branching to do lots of little commits on but bring back into the trunk ONLY what will work and is ready to be integrated into the build   One caveat with branching though is that if they aren t managed properly  it can be a nightmare in your repository to get work into the trunk  as everyone is developing from different spots on the trunk  which is incidentally one of the largest arguments for continuous integration    There is no definitive answer on this question  the best way is to work with your team to come up with the best compromise solution

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How often do you commit  As often as one would press ctrl   s    As often as possible  Code doesn t exist unless it is under source control     Frequent commits  thereafter smaller change sets  allows you to integrate your changes easily and increase chances to not break something   Other people noted that you should commit when you have a functional piece of code  however I find it useful to commit slightly more often  Few times I noticed that I use source control as a quick undo redo mechanism   When I work on my own branch I prefer to commit as much as possible  literally as often as I press ctrl s      What is a Branch and what is a Tag and how do you control them    Read SVN book - it is a place you should start with when learning SVN    What s a Branch  Tags      What goes into the SVN     Documentation  small binaries required for build and other stuff that have some value go to source control

User · Answer

For committing  I use the following strategies    commit as often as possible  Each feature change bugfix should get its own commit  don t commit many files at once since that will make the history for that file unclear -- e g  If I change a logging module and a GUI module independently and I commit both at once  both changes will be visible in both file histories  This makes reading a file history difficult   don t break the build on any commit -- it should be possible to retrieve any version of the repository and build it    All files that are necessary for building and running the app should be in SVN  Test files and such should not  unless they are part of the unit tests

User · Answer

How often do you commit  As often as one would press ctrl   s    As often as possible  Code doesn t exist unless it is under source control     Frequent commits  thereafter smaller change sets  allows you to integrate your changes easily and increase chances to not break something   Other people noted that you should commit when you have a functional piece of code  however I find it useful to commit slightly more often  Few times I noticed that I use source control as a quick undo redo mechanism   When I work on my own branch I prefer to commit as much as possible  literally as often as I press ctrl s      What is a Branch and what is a Tag and how do you control them    Read SVN book - it is a place you should start with when learning SVN    What s a Branch  Tags      What goes into the SVN     Documentation  small binaries required for build and other stuff that have some value go to source control

User · Answer

I thinks there is two way about committing frequency    Commit very often  for each implemented method  small part of code  etc  Commit only completed parts of code  like modules  etc    I prefer the first one - because using source control system is very useful not only for project or company  the first of all it s useful for the developer  For me the best feature is to roll back all code while searching the best assigned task implementation

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As others have said  the SVN Book is the best place to start and a great reference once you ve gotten your sea legs   Now  to your questions      How often do you commit  As often as one would press ctrl   s   Often  but not as often as you press ctrl   s   It s a matter of personal taste and or team policy   Personally I would say commit when you complete a functional piece of code  however small     What is a Branch and what is a Tag and how do you control them   First  trunk is where you do your active development   It is the mainline of your code   A branch is some deviation from the mainline   It could be a major deviation  like a previous release  or just a minor tweak you want to try out   A tag is a snapshot of your code   It s a way to attach a label or bookmark to a particular revision     It s also worth mentioning that in subversion  trunk  branches and tags are only convention   Nothing stops you from doing work in tags or having branches that are your mainline  or disregarding the tag-branch-trunk scheme all together   But  unless you have a very good reason  it s best to stick with convention   What goes into the SVN  Only Source Code or do you share other files here aswell   Also a personal or team choice   I prefer to keep anything related to the build in my repository   That includes config files  build scripts  related media files  docs  etc   You should not check in files that need to be different on each developer s machine   Nor do you need to check in by-products of your code   I m thinking mostly of build folders  object files  and the like

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Others have stated that it depends on your style   The big question for you is how often you  integrate  your software   Test driven development  Agile and Scrum  and many  many others  rely on small changes and continuous integration   They preach that small changes are made  everyone finds the breaks and fixes them all the time   However on a larger project  think government  defence  100k LOC  you simply can t use continuous integration as it s not possible   In these situations it may be better to use branching to do lots of little commits on but bring back into the trunk ONLY what will work and is ready to be integrated into the build   One caveat with branching though is that if they aren t managed properly  it can be a nightmare in your repository to get work into the trunk  as everyone is developing from different spots on the trunk  which is incidentally one of the largest arguments for continuous integration    There is no definitive answer on this question  the best way is to work with your team to come up with the best compromise solution

User · Answer

The subversion book is an excellent source of information on strategies for laying out your repository  branching and tagging   See also   Do you continue development in a branch or in the trunk  Branching strategies

User · Answer

Others have stated that it depends on your style   The big question for you is how often you  integrate  your software   Test driven development  Agile and Scrum  and many  many others  rely on small changes and continuous integration   They preach that small changes are made  everyone finds the breaks and fixes them all the time   However on a larger project  think government  defence  100k LOC  you simply can t use continuous integration as it s not possible   In these situations it may be better to use branching to do lots of little commits on but bring back into the trunk ONLY what will work and is ready to be integrated into the build   One caveat with branching though is that if they aren t managed properly  it can be a nightmare in your repository to get work into the trunk  as everyone is developing from different spots on the trunk  which is incidentally one of the largest arguments for continuous integration    There is no definitive answer on this question  the best way is to work with your team to come up with the best compromise solution

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I asked myself the same questions when we came to implement Subversion here -- about 20 developers spread across 4 - 6 projects   I didn t find any one good source with   the answer     Here are some parts of how our answer has developed over the last 3 years   -- commit as often as is useful  our rule of thumb is commit whenever you have done sufficient work that it would be a problem having to re-do it if the modifications got lost  sometimes I commit every 15 minutes or so  other times it might be days  yes  sometimes it takes me a day to write 1 line of code   -- we use branches  as one of your earlier answers suggested  for different development paths  right now for one of our programs we have 3 active branches  1 for the main development  1 for the as-yet-unfinished effort to parallelise the program  and 1 for the effort to revise it to use XML input and output files   -- we scarcely use tags  though we think we ought to use them to identify releases to production   Think of development proceeding along a single path   At some time or state of development marketing decide to release the first version of the product  so you plant a flag in the path labelled  1   or  1 0  or what have you    At some other time some bright spark decides to parallelise the program  but decides that that will take weeks and that people want to keep going down the main path in the meantime   So you build a fork in the path and different people wander off down the different forks   The flags in the road are called  tags   and the forks in the road are where  branches  divide   Occasionally  also  branches come back together   -- we put all material necessary to build an executable  or system  into the repository  That means at least source code and make file  or project files for Visual Studio    But when we have icons and config files and all that other stuff  that goes into the repository   Some documentation finds its way into the repo  certainly any documentation such as help files which might be integral to the program does  and it s a useful place to put developer documentation   We even put Windows executables for our production releases in there  to provide a single location for people looking for software -- our Linux releases go to a server so don t need to be stored   -- we don t require that the repository at all times be capable of delivering a latest version which builds and executes  some projects work that way  some don t  the decision rests with the project manager and depends on many factors but I think it breaks down when making major changes to a program

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The TortoiseSVN TSVN Manual is based on subversion book  but available in a lot more languages

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A lot of good comments here  but something that hasn t been mentioned is commit messages  These should be mandatory and meaningful  Especially with branching merging  This will allow you to keep track of what changes are relevant to which bugs features   for example svn commit   -m  bug  201 fixed y2k bug in code  will tell anyone who looks at the history what that revision was for   Some bug tracking systems  eg trac  can look in the repository for these messages and associate them with the tickets  Which makes working out what changes are associated with each ticket very easy

[svn] How to use SVN, Branch? Tag? Trunk?

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