Question

My team created a project. This project has already existed on each PC of each member. Now, I have just added this project to SVN using AnkhSVN. So I want to know how to each memeber of my team can use this project without check out or download this project because it has already existed. I want to using any SVN client to refer to it or something like that. Any idea for me ?

Answer 1

Short answer: they have to use SVN checkout into empty folders, sorry.

Ask your team members to:

• create new folder named “fromsvn”,
• make an SVN checkout of project into that folder,
• copy with replace existing project into “fromsvn” folder,
• commit changes if there are any.

Long answer:

During checkout SVN creates folder named “.svn” in each folder. This “.svn” folder contains the so-called “base” versions of your files. Each “base” version is a copy of the original file which is inside SVN.

When you make “clean” checkout (i.e. you download project from server into empty folder using SVN client), SVN creates both “base” versions of files (and puts them into .svn folder) and “working copy” – the ones you actually will modify and then commit. Thus, if you checkout 10Mbytes project, SVN will create 20Mbytes of files, half of which will be stored in “.svn” folder, but it will download only 10Mbytes from server.

Other members already have their projects, but they do not have “.svn” folders. It means, that SVN client still have to download those folders from SVN server repository, and it will still cost those 10Mbytes.