Question

I will be hosting a java project on SVN which will need to be downloaded by other developers with the ability of that project to be compiled / packaged on their local machine.

I would like to know what files are needing to be stored on SVN and which ones can be left out. I know the files that Netbeans creates can be left out and the build.xml will need to be included as it has code to package the libraries used in the project into the .jar file.

I am assuming that the following need to be stored on the SVN server:

/lib
/src
build.xml

• Does any of the files in the
  nbproject folder need to be added?

• If not what svn commands (IE
  svn-ignore) will I need to run to
  ignore all the files except for those
  in /lib, /src and the build.xml file?

• What should my file structure on the
  svn look like? Should I keep the
  source files in the src directory on
  svn or should I name the folder
  something else so the developer can
  then “Create a new project from
  existing source”?

Answer 1

I decided to take another route. While I had read your original post about using Maven, we are wanting to stay away from Maven as we are basically just writing a command line interface for an existing library.

Another reason I decided to do what I did was during adding my svn:ignore’s I realized that some of the developers here keep their netbeans project settings in different directories which would basically not do any good since it wouldn’t be an svn working copy in that dir.

So what I did was just add the /src and /lib directory to the repo.

The end user then checksout the repo with svn co svn+ssh://path/to/repo/trunk . and then will open netbeans and select “Create project from existing source”. At which point they will go in and add the library from the /lib directory.

I have Up Voted your answer as it would have been very helpful should I of gone through with using Maven.